


they made that boy into a weapon and told him he would bring peace

by omegalomania



Series: pray for disaster (when the world is razed we'll still be burning) [4]
Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album), The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys: California (Comics)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Abuse, Child Soldiers, Emetophobia, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, Government Experimentation, Implied/Referenced Animal Abuse, Implied/Referenced Animal Death, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Medical Abuse, Misgendering, Nonbinary Party Poison (Danger Days), Not RPF, Origin Story, POV Second Person, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Harm, The Fabulous Killjoys (Danger Days) Are Not MCR, Transphobia, Unreliable Narrator, internalized ableism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-12 12:47:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 43,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28635741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/omegalomania/pseuds/omegalomania
Summary: "Step five is to hold on to your brother and not ever, ever let go. Not for anything. Tears are bright and stinging. They bite into the back of your throat and flood your lungs with nitrogen. Never felt anything like this while still on the pills, but it's the shakes and headaches and soreness - the consequences of refusing those fistfuls of colors in first place - that are sapping you of your ability to do the one thing that would save you both.You're killing him. You're killing him just by not being able to do one thing right."
Series: pray for disaster (when the world is razed we'll still be burning) [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1509731
Comments: 32
Kudos: 26





	1. my head's in heaven, my heart's a black hole (i'd rather die than give you control)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a bit nervous about this one! I'm concerned that I haven't foreshadowed/set up what's to come in here quite enough, or that the content will be a bit too extreme in places. But there's only so much dithering I can do and I've already written the thing, so here we go.
> 
> As always, I'd like to get some content warnings out of the way before we begin this work. There's no easy way to warn for the contents of this fic without implicitly spoiling things, but I will do my best here. This installment is going to feature a lot of very ugly topics that have thus far only been hinted at. This will include descriptions and depictions of government-sanctioned experimentation and abuse (primarily psychological, medical, physiological, and pharmacological, among others) as well as a thorough examination of the repercussions of that experimentation and abuse. There are also depictions of raising animals in an abusive environment, and several mentions of animal death. Nothing explicit is depicted.
> 
> I will also note that, for this installment, I had to do a lot of research on the physical and emotional consequences associated with the training and active use of child soldiers. While there are some very key differences between the colloquial use of the term and the depictions here, the similarities between the two are nonetheless deliberate. So to be as transparent as I can while still avoiding the heftiest of spoilers: there are depictions of very young characters (as in under the age of sixteen and in earlier sections even younger) enduring training and conditioning that is reminiscent of that which might be associated with child soldiers. The ideas these characters internalize are at times unpleasant and uncomfortable, and this training does at time include psychological and physical abuse from authority figures and between peers. The long-term emotional consequences of this treatment will be felt for the duration of this fic, particularly as this treatment does affect characters with pre-existing neuroses. These characters do at times conflate their neuroses and responses to trauma with objectively negative traits; their perception of these things is not altogether accurate, and their perspective is frequently (if not always) unreliable.
> 
> Unique to this chapter, I'd like to offer a warning for incidental misgendering. I have intentionally obscured much of it and it is done wholly out of ignorance rather than malice, but it is present nonetheless. This chapter also features multiple mentions (though no depictions) of invasive surgical procedures and aforementioned governmental experimentation, a few instances of referenced vomiting, and one small instance of self-harm.

**\--**

**young one  
there are things in this forest that want to hurt you**

**\--**

You're not a good person.

This you learn not long after you turn ten.

It's no one's fault, in theory. All schools in Battery City are required by legal, written mandate to issue certain tests at certain points in a young citizen's stages of development. Tests are nothing new. You've taken plenty of them, and they all have a quantifiable purpose that's usually made clear to you prior to having them administered. Tests meant to ascertain your intelligence, your productivity, your physical fitness, and, most commonly, whether you're susceptible to disruptions of your baseline - that is to say, if you're expressing some kind of output that they don't want.

Most tests are administered by the school's pediatricians, because every school in Battery City has them. The most frequent tests are the Output Assessments, where they monitor you and ask you questions and show you certain images and video clips and at the end of them they tell you whether or not they're going to adjust your daily dosage of pills meant to keep your head the right amount of fuzzy. Those ones are the most frequent, but they're also the easiest. 

For you, anyway.

In theory, it's no one's fault. You know better than to believe it.

Most tests are repeat things, once or twice every year. OAs are issued once a month - more, if they feel like you're not quite stable. That's never been a problem for you. You take all your medications and you follow all your prescriptions to the letter. It's not an issue. It never has been, for you.

The point is that tests are nothing new to you. Not even the _one_ test that you know everyone gets once they enter grade four, the _one_ test that's notable in that, unlike any of the others you have to repeatedly take throughout your academic career, you only ever get it the once. No one's ever said what it's for, either. You've never known anyone who passed the SCE6 or got any kind of follow-up for it.

It's a simple test. Everyone takes it and not many pass it, though the criteria that facilitates a pass isn't defined for you to begin with. It covers a lot of things. It covers just about everything you've been tested on before, like all the mathematics and languages and history you'd be expected to know at this stage in your development as well as hearing and vision and physical fitness and knowledge of standard Battery City ordinances, but it has a lot of things you've never had to consider that you might be tested on before. Things like reflex rates and dexterity and memorization and how quickly you can follow a set of instructions. It's a lengthy test, long enough that you have to be split up into groups so your class can take it efficiently. You take it with four others - your class of forty divided into eight manageable clusters of five to allow the doctors to get through everyone throughout the day and gauge them accordingly.

You think you do the best out of your group of classmates - you can run faster, keep up the pace for longer, and you don't flag. You finish the written portions first and you're certain about almost all of your answers. You've always performed well in your classes. You do as you're told and you manage your dosages well and it's never been an issue for you.

You're nothing like your ░░░er, who's in and out of the school doctor's offices and always getting into trouble because h░░ output's all wrong. You've never had those kinds of problems. Your OA scores are always high. Your prescriptions are never off. Keep your head down, because you've seen what happens to your ░░░er when ░░e misbehaves.

So you perform optimally, you think, though you're not informed of the outcome of the test right away. You have no idea how well you've done until a week later, twenty minutes before bedtime ordinances kick in, a pair of draculoids and a scarecrow show up at your door and tell your mama something that you don't hear. She tells you, _begs_ you really, to go back to your room, and her eyes are so dark and scared that you obey without questioning it. You sit in the room you share with your ░░░░er and run your hands over the creases on your sheets until it's time to hook your BLi-issued headphones up to the wall outlets and lie down and close your eyes because it's time for bed so you can get your full allotted eight hours of doctor-recommended rest.

You've never seen draculoids come to your door before. You don't think you've ever seen a real live scarecrow before either. You're not certain that it's a scarecrow since you've never actually seen one, but you feel confident in your guess: it's all black leather and a featureless helmet over its head. You were _sure_ that all of them are out fighting in the desert, fighting a war you know only vaguely about from the older kids in other classes, but that no one seems to know about in any specificity. 

Listen to ░░░░er's too-rapid breathing, because ░e never sleeps gently. ░░e never does anything gently and that's what always gets h░░ into trouble. Too loud, too bright, too fast. Too much for the teachers at the school you share, and too much for your mama who does everything she can to make sure the both of you grow up right. It's always been just her taking care of you both. If you had a dad, you've never met him.

Try and search out some kind of hitch or jag in the muted static soup that's been living in your skull for years now. There's nothing but the dull recognition that there's been some inexplicable deviation in your routine and you're not sure what to do about it other than do what you always do, which is the opposite of what your ░░░░er does: as you're told.

You go to bed.

The next morning, your mama tells you that you did such a good job on your SCE6 that you're going to be switching schools.

**\--**

**yes, we mean the forest we are raising you in  
yes, we mean the forest we will not let you leave**

**\--**

Your new school is both smaller and bigger than your old one. It's a difficult feat, but it manages it.

Your ░░░er is two grades above you so you didn't see h░░ at school that often even when you were attending the same facility. ░░e would walk you to and from the facility, kicking crumpled cans down the sidewalks and chasing torn-up shreds of yesterday's homework, and when classes were dismissed ░e would walk you back, when ░░e wasn't in trouble for being a disruption. The others in your class you knew only fleetingly. Names and faces, quickly and easily forgotten when they didn't prove to be terribly important.

Here, there's no chance that you _won't_ learn the names and faces of everyone around you: there's a sum total of thirty-two students here, counting yourself.

Your new school is in the Central Sector. You remember from your lessons on city organization and geography that Battery City's center is where all the most important stuff is kept. You have to ride one of the earliest intracity maglev rails to get to Central Sector and then walk a half-mile to get where you need to go, a place called the SCT Building. The crisscrossed sidewalks and streets of Battery City are easy to navigate, built on a grid system with a minimum of overlapping. It's rare that you've been awake to see early mornings like this. The white walls of the buildings stacked in their neat rows and dedicated arrangements are shaded a dull green-blue in the half-light. It lends them an alien quality, a blurred-edge sort of unreality that sticks with you. It prickles the hairs along your arms, tingles your skin with goose-pimples. It's hard to walk the almost entirely empty streets of the city you grew up in and not feel like some kind of stranded vagrant, like a Juvie Hall slinking away from the scene of crime.

You're here for a reason, you tell yourself. You're allowed to be here - expected, even. (No. _Required.)_ This is your new school, and you have to be prompt for your first day.

It's still dark when you get there, the city mantled under that hazy early-morning shroud. The room you've been instructed to enter is large, with white-painted walls and tiered desks that arc gently around two-thirds of the high-ceilinged space. A desk and podium sit at the lowest point against one edge with a viewing panel mounted behind them, so massive it takes up almost the entire wall. 

Everything is the same blank, sterile white. This is the one point of similarity you have between this place and your old school. Aside from that...the desks are all the wrong shape, the room is vaguely half-cylindrical instead of rectangular, and there are no clocks or windows. The sense of convention that's been seeded into you since you began attending your old school at four years old is enough to settle you in one of the desks at random, by unspoken rote. The other students who arrived before you and after do the same. No one says anything to each other, save for a few whispers between those who sit close enough together for it.

You don't recognize any of them. None of them went to your old school, or have lived in your neighborhood in the Neon District. You think you'd know if they had. You'd remember them from school or from the buildings around yours. You remember everyone who lives in the same building as you. They're as familiar as the white-walled apartment buildings peering up into the leaden skies and the cool gray pavement where the tangles of weeds spill through the places where the gridding is uneven and the city maintenance automatons haven't gotten to misting the invasive growths with pesticides yet.

At 0700 hours exactly, your new instructor at your new school enters the room and surveys all thirty-two of you. She's sharper dressed than any instructor you've had previously. Short dark hair cut in a bob. Crisp white suit. A few lines that gather around the hollow, skull-like jut of her cheekbones. A sharp slash of a parenthesis for a mouth. She's pale the way everyone in the city is, uninjured by the relentless bombardment of UV rays thanks to BL/ind-patented weather control. Her expression is flat and unsmiling and she begins speaking without introduction:

"The Scarecrow Evaluation, which you know as the SCE6, is the city-wide benchmark administered to all children at age ten." She tells you this even though all of you already know it, speaking with more authority than any of the instructors you knew at your old school. 

She surveys you in one clean, unbroken sweep of her gaze. Her eyes are slate-gray and oddly translucent beneath the light. You almost feel as though you should shiver when she looks at you, but her gaze is distant and empty, wholly discerning.

"The thirty-two of you are those in your age group who performed adequately on the SCE6 and have been subsequently recommended to the Scarecrow Trainee Program," she continues. "This is, as you can imagine, a very rare opportunity. You have been called upon to serve your community, which has a great need for you."

She says it like it's a fact.

"You will refer to me as Instructor Weaver," she introduces herself at last. "And you will be learning beneath my instruction during your time in the Scarecrow Trainee Program."

Shock is a muted shiver down the length of your spine, a blink that briefly takes you out of yourself. Only briefly. You're back a moment later. 

You know what scarecrows _are,_ of course, same as everyone. But aside from the brief glimpse of the one that came to your door that once, you've never seen one face to face. You've never questioned where they came from. You don't ask those kinds of questions in Battery City. Your mama told you that once. She never teaches you a lot of things other than the same insistences to keep your head down, to listen, to follow instructions - to do everything possible to not be the person your ░░░░er is. Your mama doesn't put it like that, but you know it's what she's thinking. So you don't ask where draculoids come from, where scarecrows come from, why you have to plug your BLi-issued headphones in at certain times and why every household is allotted a television and why it has no buttons to turn it on or off but does so remotely. Don't ask about the people who vanish from classrooms and the conflict that the older kids whisper about, the one boiling out beyond the city walls. Don't ask about the Juvie Halls that live scrabbling among the litter and refuse of the Ritalin District.

Do what your mama does and don't ask questions. It's because of this instinct that it never occurred to you that scarecrows might come from people like you.

There are thirty-two of you, so Instructor Weaver numbers you all one through thirty-two based on no obvious criteria you can see. She calls you only by your numerical designations, and advises you to grow accustomed to responding to them as quickly and easily as you would to your names. You're to refer to each other by your numbers during classes and during training, she tells you. This is to remind you to always function as a unit. You're not sure what she means by that.

The designation she gives you is SCT-27.

**\--**

**young one  
the only things in this forest want to hurt you**

**\--**

They tell you that you are being trained for war. Scarecrows are the things that make all the difference on the battlefield, and in the efforts to establish better ground against the rebellious forces that threaten Better Living's very foundations, you will be the cornerstones.

You don't know very much about the Analog Wars. They hadn't been covered in history at your old school other than being named to you, and your textbooks admit that the wars themselves are still ongoing. Aside from that, as a concept it is as abstract to you as the idea of the stars and uncontrollable weather - things that exist in theory and are fully possible, but that you have personally never witnessed and therefore have never needed to concern yourself about.

But the wars exist. They're still going, and you think that Better Living might be losing. They need you and your new classmates specifically, because you were selected from a pool of thousands. You're the thing that they think will halt the war burning, smoking and cancerous, ever closer to Battery City's crisp white walls.

It's what makes your participation in your new school all the more vital.

You wake up earlier and you go to bed earlier. You're on a specific schedule that deviates slightly from the city-wide ordinances. You have to be at the SCT building by 0530 hours and you need to be asleep in your bed by 2030 hours at the latest if you want to get your required eight hours rest for the following day. This means you need to be awake by 0500, when the city is still submerged the semi-dark quiet before the security automatons and businesspeople start walking up for their early shifts. The streets are always empty save for the handful of draculoid patrols that still comb the area in regimented, regular sweeps. You go through your new schedule in a drowsy shamble until you can wake up properly. The brisk morning air is usually sufficient enough, slapping you into wakefulness when you step outside the front door to the apartment building and onto the sidewalk crisscrossed with weeds.

Your uniform changes slightly, thought not overly. Instead of a white button-down it's a simple tee, and your starchy black shorts are traded for something lighter. Still no pockets. You have to keep your hair shorter than even before, your dark roots buzzed down to a thin fuzz around your skull.

The SCT Program wakes you up properly, you learn quickly. The shift in uniform makes more sense once you learn that your arrival to the SCT Building will immediately be followed by a sequence of physical drills. Sit-ups, leg lifts, deep squats, push-ups, jumping jacks, jogs around an indoor track. For weeks, your muscles tremor uncontrollably after the constant repetition.

Those who hesitate, falter, or fail are taken to isolation. It happens to you once, when you hadn't slept as well as usual the night before and couldn't manage to keep up with the rest of your class. Isolation means being sent to a room slightly smaller than a closet, the walls featureless but for the black ball of a wall-mounted security cam in the corner. There's nowhere to sit and it's not big enough to crouch comfortably in anyway. They say one too many times in iso, and you'll be out of the program. It happens to one of your classmates after the first two weeks. 

You don't see him again.

The schedule doesn't change overmuch, day to day. Once your body adjusts, it's not hard to get locked into the routine.

Arrive early. Run physical drills. Cool-downs, then mathematics. Sparring drills. History and languages. Equipment handling and maintenance, sciences, and then one final round of physical reps to close out the day at 1730 hours.

Then you return home. Your mother asks you how your day is. You tell her the same thing, every time.

_Good._

You have no words for the intensive, unrelenting pace of your new school, which is unlike any class you've attended before. Even if you did, it wouldn't matter; you're under strict orders from your instructor to keep talk of your new school, exclusive and highly advanced as it is, restricted to when on site. In short, you're not supposed to bring it up. Ever.

You're not sure anyone would believe you even if you did. It's not as if you see your old classmates with the hours you have now. You barely see your mama and your ░░░░er as it is.

Nothing's changed. Your ░░░er still gets in trouble and your mama has to clean up h░░ messes and deal with h░░ behavioral remedies. You do your homework. You perform well in school. You take your prescriptions, even after the adjustments you get to fit your new regime and schedule. More proteins and energy supplements, and the shift makes your eyes jitter in their sockets sometimes but you weather it and come out Better on the other side. You go to bed a little earlier and you wake up before anyone else at home does, save for your mama, and you go to school on time.

Everything's changed. The rate of OAs you and the others in your class receive slows considerably, replaced with blood tests and dexterity tests and memorization of things like the names of the muscles in the human body and the arrangement of important veins and arteries (bones of the human arm and hand: clavicle, scapula, humerus, radius, ulna, scaphoid, trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate, pisiform, triquetral, lunate, hamate, metacarpals, then the proximal, intermediate, and distal phalanges). The price of failure is higher. It's not the concern of your instructor or the risk of the scorn of your peers, which has never been a problem for you - you've always scored higher than most. Now it's the risk that you'll be sent to iso or made to run drills instead of getting to eat. It's the threat of the taste of blood in the corner of your mouth when you don't obey fast enough. _Again._ Instructor Weaver's voice in your head, always, iron and uncompromising. _Do it again. Faster this time._

You see your ░░░░er less than you did. You're not really sure how to feel about that.

░░e's not a bad person. Not like you. ░e's your ░░░░er, two years older than you and possessed with a sharp tongue and a sharper wit and you've never needed to organize the affection you feel for h░░ (though love is obsolete these days, functionally worthless, and it'd be best if you could disregard it). It's your ░░░er who you know like a song, like the daily route you take to school, like the address to your apartment building that you've known by heart since you were four years old. You look at h░░ and you have every tiny detail committed to memory: the way h░░ hands move when ░e writes h░░ name, the exact way the watery daylight filtering into the city hits h░░ eyes at just the right angle and makes them a liquid gold, the angles in h░░ shoulders and when the tension there draws so tight that you know it means ░░e's about to let fists fly. It's your ░░░░er who's always been an absolute nightmare to live with, who bites when you get into brawls and flicks the back of your head and blows air into your eyes and calls you a snake just to bother you but will in the same breath threaten to beat the shit out of kids who give you a hard time - a threat you know ░e'd have no difficulty following up on, even if it's overwhelmingly likely that ░░e'd end up pounded into a paste because of it. When you went to the same school you'd pass h░░ in the halls, recognize the shapes of bruises darkening h░░ skin or the uneven limp ░e'd carry to and from class.

░e's your ░░░░er and you know everything about h░░, from the shape of h░░ nose to the way ░░e chews on h░░ lower lip when ░e's nervous, from the sound h░░ shoes make when they slap on the weed-cracked concrete just outside your apartment building to the exact pitch and tone of h░░ voice when ░░e's annoyed with you.

But don't see h░░ as often now. Because you're not at home as often, because you leave for classes before your ░░░░er does and you get back later than h░░, and by the time you do you're usually too tired to make even idle conversation. Your head's always buzzing with what you've taken away from classes that day, intent on committing it all to memory as quickly as you can.

You learn more in your first year in the SCT Program than you have in the past several years of regular schooling combined. It makes your head spin, how much of it there is. There's no time for anything but the memorization of every skill and fact that they grill into you. You learn quickly. There's no alternative. It's learn things fast and master things faster or get culled from the ranks when you fail to perform adequately. You've already glimpsed the classes above you, sectioned off in other training rooms - the kids who passed the SCE6 a year before you only have fifteen to their class left, and the ones who got in two years earlier have even fewer at ten.

You don't see the other classes very much. You pass them sometimes, filtering into the building in the mornings, but they don't acknowledge you except to on occasion nudge each other and mutter things under their breath.

SCTs are a shrinking pool. That's all you need to know. Those who are cut loose from the program disappear from your life completely.

You don't intend to be like them, not when you've succeeded at just about everything else, so you can't screw this up.

Make it a habit to recite to yourself what you've learned. In your downtime, run through mental drills to accompany the physical ones you've grown accustomed to.

Your first year in the SCT Program, here's what you know:

How to field strip a Mark-III Individual (Scarecrow-Issue) and put it back together in ten seconds or less. The history of the Helium Wars in the Americas and the establishment of the New American Commonwealth. How to do long division in your head. How to cauterize an open wound. How the Analog Wars came to Battery City's front door and why scarecrows are the most powerful weapon available to end them with a minimal loss of life or city structure. The difference between an Analog soldier, colloquially termed a "killjoy," and a standard resident of the desert outside Battery City, and that this difference ultimately amounts to nothing because they all stand for the same thing. What a laser blast at point blank range does to someone's skin, bone, nerve endings, and muscle tissue. The mechanisms responsible for a battery-powered floating vehicle. That it only takes a pound of pressure to cut human skin. How to assemble an EX-22 battle rifle. That the EX-22 is most efficient at mid-to-long distance with a maximum range of seven hundred meters and has a scope twice as accurate as its predecessor, as well as an alternate burst setting that can send three rapid-fire blasts of high-powered plasma into a hostile at mid-range. The location and name of every bone in the human skeleton. How to read in both English and Japanese. How to keep your strafe recoil compensation vent from overheating during a period of sustained fire. How long the human body can last without food or water or oxygen.

Knowing it is not enough to guarantee your continued place in the SCT Program.

It's the first time in your life that you haven't been the best in your class at something. You're all in the ninety-ninth percentile, consistently competing for the highest marks. Don't slow down, don't stop, don't let the others get too far ahead. The five who score best daily are rewarded with a quarter-hour break near the end of the day. Those who fall short run additional drills.

Daily scores are digitally tallied on the leaderboard in black and white. The screen behind the instruction desk always has the board on partial or full view for everyone to see. The visual feels intentional, like the constant reminder that you're being ranked against your classmates is meant to spur you into doing better.

For you, it's less the question that you might not do as well as the rest, and more the fear that you'll do _worse_ than the rest that galvanizes you. You were chosen for this. You can't make that worthless.

That, and the fact that when someone is removed from the SCT Program, there's no knowing where they go. You never see them again. 

You think you're better off not knowing. Never knowing.

"Such bullshit," mutters one of your classmates. You can put a name, or rather a number, to him on sight. Dalton Reese, designated SCT-06, two weeks your senior, lives in the Beacon District situated in the upper-class West Sector of Battery City. Noticeably shorter and broader than you. Dark hair, darker eyes, prone to giving himself away by smirking.

"Aim better during target practice, then." The retort comes from Lydia Gates, designated SCT-28, five weeks your junior, also housed in the Beacon District. Slight build, thin face, paler than you by degrees. She's a redhead, with a startlingly vibrant crop of orange hair that makes her stand out even when it's buzzed short like everyone else's. Frequently seen with SCT-06. You think they must have known each other at their old school. That, or they grew up in close proximity to one another in the same district. You're supposed to refer to them solely by their numerical designations, but they call each other by their names frequently enough for you to have picked up on them.

If you could push aside that information to make room for all the things that are actually _useful_ to know, you would.

"Don't see _you_ up on that leaderboard, Gates," says 06, pitching the words high and mocking. "Didn't even make top ten."

They notice you watching.

"Got something to _say,_ Neon?" sneers 28. She and 06 have called you that ever since they found out that you're the only one in the class to live in the Neon District. It's not exactly the most disreputable part of Battery City, far from as destitute as the city's slums. You and your mama and your ░░░░er share one of the small apartments in a building whose lights occasionally flicker and a front step that's crumbling and hasn't been replaced for years now. A little cramped, but serviceable. It's not like any of you are Ritalin Rats combing through garbage and playing truant.

That doesn't seem to matter to either of them. SCT-06 and 28 have both made a habit of it, calling you _Neon_ with a bright, jeering lilt to the word. It's better than being called by your number, but your reflex to respond to the diminutive is difficult to train yourself out of. They laugh every time you look over your shoulder at them after they shout out the word in the middle of jogging drills, and every time it feels like a defeat.

Ignore them. You placed fourth on the board today (you would have been third, but you always slip behind during target practice), so you think you've earned the right to ignore their pointed remarks. There's a swilling in your gut that's almost like pride, but you gnaw it down quick. You know better than to indulge in a trap like that.

"SCTs 03, 14, 20, 27, and 31," calls Instructor Weaver. Even if you're missing more of your classmates - you've lost four by now, removed from the program when they couldn't "perform adequately," as Weaver puts it - you all keep your numerical designations. Fourth on the leaderboard means that you and the other four SCTs take a quarter-hour break and watch the rest of your classmates run their drills. 

The next week, the daily tallies stop being daily and start being cumulative instead, and the cost of failing grows steeper. Those who rank too low are made to run drills instead of taking lunch, leaving everyone scrambling to not be the unlucky ones left to wait out the rest of the day without protein.

This only intensifies as training does, as your understanding of the battlefield expands from technical skill to knowledge of tactics. The most frequent and cutthroat exercise in refining this understanding comes in the form of team-to-team firefight matches. You are being trained for war, so you need to understand war. They do everything they can to teach you of the intricacies of command. You are not going to be draculoids or exterminators or mindless grunts, after all; you are going to be the forces that the turn the tide of every battle.

You're kids. You're not kids. You're soldiers in the making. You're learning to do things that kids don't generally need to learn. You're learning mathematics and history and biology alongside how to shell a spent battery pack from a gun and load in a new one smoothly without dropping it.

You're not kids.

You're just walking around looking like them until eventually you'll start looking a little more like the weapons you're turning into.

"They're going to try flanking us," says SCT-06. "11, you're gonna take 27 and and lay down suppressing fire." SCT-06 directs his instructions to SCT-11 and not to you, you guess, because 06 has decided that he still doesn't like you and his opinion of you hasn't seem to have changed. This is all in spite of the fact that you place just below him on the leaderboard, ranked third overall beneath 06's second and 28's first; the cumulative total has helped them both maintain better leads, apparently. He's the one leading half of the class because SCT-28 is leading the other half, and leaderboard cappers are always the de facto leads during team-based drills.

The exercise is one of strategy. Your team is to get the other team's flag back to your side of the field before they do the same to you. The large, empty gym where you usually run most of your training drills has several new additions of obstacles for blocking and cover, and each of you have been supplied with a Mark-III Individual BL/ind-sanctioned raygun, settings locked so they issue paralyzing stun bolts rather than fatal laser blasts. They still hurt to get hit with, and you'll be penalized if you take too much fire and get culled out of the exercise early.

It's important, Instructor Weaver says, that you learn and grow accustomed to the heft of an Individual as quickly as possible. That you learn to adapt to it.

"We did that last time," argues SCT-11. She's smaller than almost anyone in the class, her hair a mousy brown that's only a few degrees darker than her slightly mottled complexion. She's far from the bottom of the board, but she's nowhere near the top either. Too anxious. Prone to overthinking. Skittish, freezes up in a fight. "They'll see it coming."

"That's why _we're_ going to be sneaking around the back," says 06, smugly. "Keep up, 11."

11 might not be keeping up, but you are. The plan relies on you playing bait.

Adjust your grip on your gun. It's meant to be handled one-handed, but it's too big for your prepubescent hands to be using as intended. The same can be said for most of your classmates at least. You know the name of every part of the weapon and how to take it apart and snap it back together, how to clean it and maintain it and keep it firing well, how to aim and fire, but you're not as good a shot as 28 is. That's one of the primary reasons why you're the one taking orders instead of giving them.

It prickles, but it doesn't chafe. You take your pills too regularly for it to be anything but a faint buzz of friction, a ragged fringe in the corners of your brain. Easy to dismiss. Just enough incentive to _do Better._ Do Better for your own sake but more importantly for SCT-06's - so you can wipe that smug expression from his face.

"All right, break. Move your ass, Neon," snaps 06, when you fail to respond to his directive promptly. You don't shift, don't glare, don't do anything to communicate your disdain other than narrow your eyes very slightly. Even the slightest implication that you don't intend to follow orders will cost your daily point total, you've learned very quickly. Settle instead for making certain that your disapproval communicates itself in other ways.

He doesn't seem to notice.

"Come on." Get up, finger taut on the trigger of your gun. SCT-11 is just behind you.

"We're bait," she whispers, as if you don't already know.

"Yeah," you answer.

28's team is making better headway than you thought. The first enemy bolt nearly clips your shoulder, and you throw yourself to the ground just before the next salvo hits. SCT-11 presses herself up against the tipped over table serving as your impromptu cover. Her knuckles have blanched until they're as white as the clean coat of finish on her gun.

"What do we do?" 11 whispers. She looks to you for instruction for some reason. Probably because you're higher up on the board than her, so she imagines you must have some idea of how to act in the situation.

"The job," you say. "Lay down suppressing fire."

"That's going to kill us!" It'll stun you, and taking a stun shot will be a deduction from your score, but you can take the hit on both counts. Maybe SCT-11 can't.

That's not something you can worry about right now. Disobeying orders will dock more points from your total than taking the hit will.

Don't answer her. Duck out from behind cover and start firing. It's enough to scatter the opposition, briefly. Head count: five on two. You're outnumbered. Badly. Hopefully 06 is making _some_ kind of progress while you keep 28's forces preoccupied, or this will have all been for nothing. 

Maybe he just wants to see you stunned and twitching feebly on the ground while the electric current rips through you. Maybe he wants to see you piss yourself, which is a sixty-percent likelihood after getting hit with a stun bolt from a Mark-III Individual - sustained electrical currents used to elicit pain will generate intensive musculoskeletal convulsions as an intended side effect and the injury to the muscles can, among other things, damage the kidneys in the long-term but in the short-term are more prone to inflicting a state akin to paralysis and the subsequent jolt to the nervous system tends to mean that bowel and bladder control both short out very quickly.

With all that considered, the sixty-percent likelihood of pissing yourself feels like an optimistic estimate.

Whatever satisfaction 28 wants, you're not giving it to him, you decide. You're going to face all five of your classmates even if you're outnumbered. You're going to shoot them all down.

Drop down when another shot nearly catches you on the chin. The sizzle of the white bolt crackles past the top of your head, the static heat of it humming menacingly as it streaks overhead and makes the short, bristly hairs on the back of your neck stand on end.

Up again. Make every shot count. Disorderly waste of power will reflect negatively on your score. Don't get fancy. Center of mass is easiest to aim for and it does the quickest job of disabling the opposition. Two shots, and you nail one of the opposing team in the chest. You're in one spot so in theory they should be able to flank you and take you down fast but you're not about to make it that easy for them. If they're going to leave you stunned and shivering on the floor you'd like to make them work for it.

They're already moving forward, keen, like that might be enough to pin you down. You've no intention of playing to their expectations. You scramble over the table, opening fire. Some of the opposition fires in response, startled, but their aim is scattershot. They're too shocked by your sudden advance to do a better job of aiming. You dip to one side as the bright blitz of light erupts just in front of you, a frustratingly pointless instinct considering how quickly laser blasts move, and considering that it wasn't aiming for you anyway.

SCT-11 screams when she goes down. Not surprising. Stun bolts always hurt. You've been hit with them often enough to know.

But they don't _smoke_ the way this one does. They don't curdle the air with the stench of cooking flesh.

11 keeps screaming, and everything slows. The opposition stops firing to look at SCT-11 and now everyone's looking at SCT-11. When you turn and look for yourself, you understand why.

She took the hit to the shoulder. A stun blast is intended to incapacitate and slow, not seriously injure. It operates by unleashing a bolt that operates like an electric shock, a sustained tetany of musculature intended to cause minimal harm unless one has preexisting deficiencies such as congenital heart problems _(If your heart is aching, don't de-lay! Better your vitals with us to-day!)_ so even if it _hurts_ to get hit with them, it's not meant to permanently incapacitate anyone.

As a rule, stun bolts paralyze, temporarily disable, and cause a tremendous amount of pain or discomfort. They do not burn, and they do not bleed.

SCT-11 is screaming.

She won't stop screaming.

Her shoulder is a cratered mess, the white of her uniform's shirt stained red and black from the blood and char now seeping sluggishly down the length of her arm. A stream of grayish smoke pours from the open wound. Behind you is the sound of footsteps, the rush of people halting mid-drill, emerging from cover, staring and gaping and murmuring to one another in muted shock.

That's not an injury sustained by a stun blast. That's the result of a full-power laser bolt to the shoulder. You've read - you _know -_

It's the first time you've seen one up close.

In the span of maybe twenty seconds, this is what you can recall of an injury sustained by a Mark-III BL/ind-sanctioned Individual:

The bolts are high-powered, kinetic, superheated. Potentially lethal. Capable of chewing through the dermis and damaging muscle and nerve tissue beneath due to the similarity to a standard full-thickness burn. Blitzes hot enough to scald flesh but not hot enough to seal the wound; designed not to cauterize but to bleed. Intended to neutralize a target quickly. High likelihood of fatality if the resulting injury is left untreated. All but point-blank shots will bleed quickly but the eschar and scabbing and risk of infection of an exposed burn injury will kill slowly. It's meant to.

The site of injury on 11's shoulder is a mass of blackened flesh and peeling skin, and it's already beginning to glisten crimson. 

Yank off your shirt on reflex, ball it up to press it to the flaking, sticky mess, the pilling dribbles of red and char. The pitch and fervor of SCT-11's agony ramps up the second fabric touches the open wound. Her hand finds your wrist, her fingers shaking (every part of her is shaking). Her grip locks too tightly, nails digging into your skin. She's saying something between gasps and sobs but the words are too mangled and you're focusing on trying to stopper the bleeding and get the shot as clean as possible. _What do you know?_ How to clean a raygun injury. The location of the muscles most likely damaged in the shot (lateral and anterior deltoids, pectoralis major, possibly extending to the bicep). The likelihood that SCT-11 will not recover her full range of movement once the shot has healed (in Battery City, less than fifteen percent mobility loss on average - anywhere else, a little higher than eighty-five percent).

Standard treatment of a raygun blast: apply pressure to slow the bleeding. Clean the injury in a sterile environment, apply antibiotics and pain medication followed by intravenous fluids and electrolytes -

"At ease, SCT-27." The words cut through the serrated edge of your resolve and you look up. Instructor Weaver stands at parade rest, watching you. Everyone's watching you. You hadn't really registered that until now. Everything else had fallen away save for the bright tang of blood and now it all returns in a rush, a heat, a weight around your temples. 

If you wait too long and Weaver has to repeat herself then you'll get points deducted from your daily total but SCT-11 is bleeding.

You've been told _at ease._

Untreated, a laser-burn can bleed out. The longer it's exposed to the open air, the higher the risk of infection and therefore death.

You've been ordered to stand.

Loosen your grip on the injury and stand and face Instructor Weaver, stripped down to a white singlet with a red-stained front, hands soaked in red and tack. 11 is still on the floor, whimpering.

"Match ended," says Weaver flatly. "Point awarded to SCT-28 and her unit."

Behind her, glimpse 28. She has your team's flag held triumphant in one fist and a smoking raygun in the other. Somewhere buried beneath the patina of numbness mantled over you, some part of you twinges in protest to this. That the match wasn't called to a halt the instant someone was shot. That they're all wasting time standing idly around SCT-11 as she lies there, trembling, sobbing, with your wadded-up shirt still stuck to the smoldering wreck that's been made of her left shoulder.

Weaver removes the radio clipped to her belt and speaks to it with the same flat, listless tone she always uses: "Medical to training floor 4B."

"Instructor Weaver," says SCT-03 behind you, petulant, "why was there live fire on the training floor? I thought our Individuals were locked to 'stun' settings only."

"They were," says Weaver. She looks to 28, her gaze flat and assessing. "SCT-28, it was your team that fired the shot."

"Yeah, it was," says 28, unrepentant. It's obvious that she's the one responsible, her own weapon still radiating heat and smoke. "I broke the lock and altered settings."

"You _what?"_ Behind you, 03 gasps it out in muted shock. _"How?"_

Everyone continues to ignore 11 sobbing on the ground, half-curled into herself.

Avoid looking at her.

"That's not fair," mutters SCT-06. "They won the match by _cheating."_

"Fall in line, SCTs," barks Weaver. _"Now."_

Perform as instructed: hands behind your back, eyes straight ahead, shoulder to shoulder with your fellow trainees. SCT-28 holsters her gun and stands beside you. She's relaxed, unconcerned, her chin lifted up slightly. If it bothers her that she's just shot one of her classmates, it doesn't show.

SCT-11 bleeds and cries as she lies there, unacknowledged. Medical personnel are slow to arrive.

"Ingenuity and adaptability on the battlefield," says Instructor Weaver, "are to be commended, not punished. SCT-28, you and your team will be awarded with additional marks. Well done."

It's hard to think through the numbness in your head, in your fingertips, fizzling beneath your skin. 11 is still sobbing on the floor when the medical personnel start to trickle in. They're in white, helmeted and suited and moving quickly to intercept SCT-11, lift her onto a mobile gurney and then clear the area. They work efficiently. They leave a streak of maroon on the ordinarily spotless white floor. Nothing else remains to denote that anything was ever amiss. 

It'd be easier to believe that if you didn't carry the evidence on your skin. Your hands are still coated in the stains of 11's injury, your heart hammering in your ears. The hot, salty scent of someone else's blood lingers in the air, clinging to the roof of your mouth and the back of your throat.

"SCT-27," says Weaver. Force your eyes to snap to hers. Eye contact means you're listening, means you're attentive, means you're doing as you're told. "You deviated significantly from instruction. Instead of performing as you were ordered, you acted of your own volition and utilized your knowledge of basic medical procedure to ensure the quick recovery of an injured teammate. This disobedience will be reflected on your daily marks."

A faint chill briefly congeals in your insides. It doesn't last long. It never does.

"Your medical technique, however, was excellent, indicating that you've learned to put what you've retained from our medical and biology units to use," Weaver continues. "This will also be reflected on your daily marks."

Nod, unsure if you have permission to speak out of turn and unwilling to risk it. You've risked enough. Your hands and shirt are slicked in red. Suppress the urge to ask if you'll be allowed to wash up. If SCT-11 will be all right.

Most of the medical personnel have departed, but there's someone you don't recognize lingering by the training room door. He's tall and pale, the over-bright lighting reflecting dully off the shine of his bald head. His long gray coat doesn't quite conceal the lump of a weapon holstered at his side. 

You don't recognize him, but what else could he be but a scarecrow? There's no other reason someone like him would be allowed here. It's a real live scarecrow standing there, watching you, when you've only ever _glimpsed_ scarecrows before now, like the one that came to your door the night that changed everything for you. 

He notices you staring. His eyes, oil-dark and colder than the fist clenched in your gut, flick to meet yours. Look away at once.

"The exercise is over. Return to your seats," Weaver orders all of you. When you start to move with everyone else, she stops you. "SCT-27, go clean up. Quickly."

Hasten to obey. If you take too long you might be penalized further, and SCT-06 won't let you hear the end of it.

"You've never treated an injury before?" You know the voice belongs to the scarecrow even if you've never heard it before, because it's both unfamiliar and arresting, both crisp and direct. Freeze on the spot. He probably outranks Weaver, which entitles him to a level of deference and respect equal to if not greater than her own.

"No," you tell him hesitantly. Meet his eyes unhesitatingly. Wet your lips, then, "sir."

The scarecrow is neither taller nor broader than Weaver or any other adult by a significant margin, but he feels bigger. He looms. It's hard to feel like he _isn't_ looming. His presence has a tangible weight to it, like no one else you've ever met.

"You're smart," he tells you, "and you're resourceful. A good trait for any scarecrow."

He smiles at you. It's a thin, bladed thing that doesn't reach his eyes. You bow your head and mutter your thanks but you can't stay long on account of the fact that Instructor Weaver is looking at you, hard. You need to hurry.

By the time you exit the showers, your hands are clean and your shirt's crimson stains are now a deep, unappealing brown. You'd scrubbed as much as you could, but there's no rinsing the red from the white, you guess. You're going to need to ask your mama for a new shirt. Instructor Weaver won't have you wearing this one, you're certain of it.

The scarecrow is gone, but the feel of his stare stays with you for the rest of the day.

**\--**

**young one  
the things in this forest have claws and fangs**

**\--**

There isn't an incident like SCT-11's again. In spite of Weaver's praise of the innovation, from that point forward additional precautions are taken to ensure that no one can break the limitations set on their rayguns during team drills again. A few others try here and there, but only succeed in wasting their own time and getting themselves picked off during firefights.

SCT-11 does not rejoin your ranks. Your class of thirty-two has dwindled down to twenty-five and it's only been your first year. SCT-06 and SCT-28 grapple for the top spot on the leaderboard while the rest of you fight just to keep up.

That changes when they start the unit on hand-to-hand.

You're too small right now, your Instructor tells you, but you'll grow into what you're learning now. Your targets are going to be one another during drills but you need to adjust to what it feels like to face someone bigger and stronger than you. Your size and weight, at age eleven, aren't significant so you need to play to the only advantage you have, which is the element of surprise. People don't expect kids your age to fight back and they don't expect them to fight _well._ That being said, there's only so much you can do against an opponent that much bigger and more skilled than you, so it's best to take someone down as quickly as possible.

Learn how to break a grip on your wrist. How to use your lower center of gravity to derail an adult opponent. Mostly learn how to fight each other.

In a tight spot, go for the eyes, throat, groin, or fingers. It takes alarmingly little pressure to efficiently break a wrist. Never throw a punch with your thumb tucked beneath your fingers. Never hold still. Don't let anyone corner you; if they pin you down, that can end the fight faster than anything. A targeted, strong enough hit to the solar plexus (by forming a sharp blade with your hand, or with the point of your elbow) can be enough to lay a grown man out and in some cases can be outright fatal. 

The first time you run sparring drills you end up flat on your back while 28 gloats at you and calls you a _neon rat,_ and you lie there with your spine smarting from the impact against the gray polyethylene foam-cored sparring mat. It ignites a needlepoint of something hot and simmering inside of you, a buzz that runs from the crown of your head to the tips of your fingers.

You're used to being _beaten_ because while you've been at the top of the leaderboard consistently, you've never been at the _top_ of the leaderboard, and 06 and 28 always have something to say about it. They fight perfectly. They fight like they've been taught. They know how to throw a punch and how to hold their stances exactly right and when to block a blow and when to dodge it.

But they fight _fair._ They telegraph everything. They come at you head-on.

It doesn't stop them from overpowering you consistently, threatening your position on the leaderboard. Knocking you down to fourth, then fifth, and then off of it entirely.

Grit your teeth through it. Wait for an OA or a performance review or, worse, the call to Weaver's office that prefaces being sent to iso. Or, worst of all, being dropped from the program entirely. You don't anticipate any sort of warning for it. There's never any warning. Kids who get dropped from the program disappear abruptly; they're there one day and gone the next. They're always the ones lowest on the board, but SCT-11 has proven to you that a glaring enough slip-up will see you cut loose without a second thought.

You have a job in the program and that job is to prove that you're not expendable. You can't fight as well as the others but you were selected for the SCT Program for a reason, weren't you? Your SCE6 scores were exceptional. You weren't just invited to the program; it was mandated of you. It was required by city ordinances. You, and not your errant ░░░░er who makes the work of all h░░ teachers difficult and gets into trouble so frequently that you lose track of just how rarely your schedules intersect these days.

You're supposed to be good at this. The fact that you're not unfurls something inside you, a deep red bolt of heat that coils like a noose around your intestines. When you were kids (younger kids than you are now) you and your ░░░er would brawl without regard for your surroundings or one another, leave dents and cracks in the wall until your mama would intervene with a high, scared tone in her voice. You don't have the energy for that now and you don't see your ░░░░er enough for that anymore anyway, but the memory alone is a temptation. It's the promise of feeling something, anything, even if it's little more than the crack of knuckles against drywall and the dark network of cracks that would spider out from the point of contact. Maybe your mama would come into your room and yell at you for it. Maybe your ░░░er would try to take the blame the way ░e _always does_ because ░░e knows who ░e is and ░░e's the problem child, right? The one who's always such a big issue, right?

It'd be better than sitting and marinating in whatever this is, this unformed soup of half-baked emotion that you're supposed to be getting better at suppressing. It'd be _something._ It'd be anything. It'd mean the choking, nuclear warhead boiling away in your guts would have somewhere to go and wouldn't just fizzle out like a dying satellite. The taste of failure is the taste of blood in your mouth and the sting of a slap and the hardline burn of disappointment in Instructor Weaver's eyes but you'd take that over what you're feeling right now.

You're slipping. Everything's slipping further and further away from you and you're powerless to stop it and that's not new exactly but it digs a line of cyanide into your soul and the inability to do anything about it is killing you.

Surely it's killing you. 

Eating you alive from the inside out, slowly.

**\--**

**yes, we mean claws like the ones on your hands  
yes, we mean fangs like the ones in your mouth**

**\--**

"How was school?" your mama asks you, the same way she does every time you come home. She asks it even if the furrows in her brow seem like they're darkening by the day, even if the way her eyes pinch up at the corners means that she's worried about something. You have her eyes: dark, monolidded, slightly tapered at the edges. Your ░░░er's are a little paler, but yours are hers almost exactly. You look at her and you search her gaze for some measure of familiarity outside of the obvious. Some candlelight-gutter of affection in the nucleus of you, some latent crumb of acknowledgment, anything at all for the woman who's raised you and your ░░░░er both.

"Good," you tell her, like always. You're tired. You're always tired after school, with just the requisite amount of energy to respond to your mama and your ░░░░er in the most cursory sense before shambling to bed. Don't acknowledge what your classes have you do. Carry the bruises safely beneath your uniform jacket. Whenever they do glisten on your face, a patchwork of yellow and purple, your mama never speaks up against them. She knows her job in the city, when she's not working, and it's to keep quiet. She's like you that way.

Wear the bruises like badges. They're not battle scars, but you think they will be one day. One day it'll be laser blasts and sun-rash, when you're out in the frontlines.

"Your ░░░er is out," your mama says finally, as you're about to turn toward the room you share with h░░. When you look askance at her, her mouth purses a bit. She doesn't meet your eyes. "░░e...was taken in for re-education."

Struggle to think of something to say to that.

"Oh," you tell her, after far too long a pause. There's a pooling of something congealing in your guts.

Ignore it.

"So it'll just be us tonight," your mama continues bravely. Nod, as though there's not an odd tingling numbness settling in your bones and tracing the ridges of your spine. Nod and head inside and sit on the floor and stare at the empty bed across from yours. You know that your ░░░░er has been, historically, a _problem child,_ as your old school liked to put it. You know ░e's had trouble...adjusting, at times, to the subtle prescription changes required by h░░ mandated OAs. But this is the first time that ░e's been sent away because of it.

(You, of course, take your prescriptions as instructed. You swallow them down every day, and they help you perform as well as you need to in classes and during drills. Can't keep up your momentum in the program if you _don't.)_

That night, it's difficult to sleep. You're not sure why that is, except for the obvious: that you can't quite manage it without the steady sound of your ░░░░░er's breathing to ease you off, distant through the BL/ind-issued white noise that buzzes in your headphones during sleeping hours but nonetheless present when those sounds taper off and it's just the pair of you. You've shared the same room for as long as you can remember. You can't adjust to h░░ absence; you catch yourself missing the physical presence of another body in the room with you.

Unconsciously, let yourself imagine a world where ░░e never comes back. Imagine what it might be like, waking up always with an empty bed across from yours. Never again seeing the line of tension that rearranges the set of h░░ shoulders when a truly good idea comes to h░░. For a moment, you let that world inhabit you. You breathe it in and let it breed in the core of you and you contemplate the nothingness it leaves behind. You fail to recognize that void sensation as horror (because you have never been instructed to recognize it as such) (because you have come to be intimately familiar with the feeling to the point where you can no longer recognize it as anything other than the way you have always felt).

Here's the earliest memory you have locked up deep in the recesses of your brain: your ░░░░er just ahead of you while you chase at h░░ heels. You're both running along the uneven sidewalks outside the building where you will grow up, and your big ░░░er laughs while ░e skitters ahead, always ahead and just out of reach. ░░e doesn't notice that ░e's ahead of you, just that you're with h░░ and that's what cracks h░░ smile open - the fact that you're with h░░. You labor to keep up with a toddler's wobbling, uneven gait, and eventually the determination to catch up is what snags the toe of your shoe on one of those thick cracks in the pavement. It tips you forward, smashes your face into the ground.

You remember not the pain but the way your ░░░░er had peered at you, fuzzy through a film of tears and snot, and how ░░e'd pulled you up to your feet and rubbed the back of your head as bracingly as ░░e could manage.

 _"Shh,"_ ░e says in the bedded chambers of your memory. _"Shh. Shh. It's okay."_

That's the first thing you can remember: your ░░░░er stopping everything to turn around and come back for you.

Remember: the tang of tears after every childhood fight. The feel of your ░░░er's teeth on the back of your hand during the worst ones. You fought like stray animals, your mama used to say, her worry pinching the corners of her eyes and darkening the wrinkles in her forehead. 

Also this: Skipping lunch for three months to save up enough carbons to buy h░░ a new pair of shoes for h░░ birthday because the ones ░e had were so worn that you could see the heel of h░░ sock through the sole. The holes in h░░ ratty backpack while ░░e raced you to school (and won, every time). Remember the smell of cold coffee in the mornings because your mama always lets a cup sit, half-drunk, through the night. The tacky cling of the cough syrup-y tasting BL/ind branded vitamin drinks, slightly warm from the city's default temperature settings and blandly sugary in a way that was probably meant to be appealing. Remember savoring the victory, all sticky-sweet and preservatives, because your ░░░░er had claimed the cans from a broken vending machine after school and the pair of you drank the entire stack of them just to get away with it - spent the night puking up your spoils until the whole bathroom reeked of bile and regret. Falling asleep with your ░░░░er's back against yours, huddled in the same bed because you were both having nightmares and neither of you could sleep alone.

Let the swill of those memories hemorrhage inside you. Let them build until they're pressed against the backs of your lids and the roots of your teeth. Let the sensation of them blister furiously until they plateau the way all things do, static and numb and senseless.

Wait for them to recede.

And go to bed.

Your ░░░er is back a week later, eyes dulled and acting much more subdued than usual. ░░e barely reacts in the scant handful of moments when you can actually talk to h░░, and h░░ gaze feels oddly blunted, nothing like the incisive, scathing thing it usually is.

It feels wrong. It's impossible for you to verbalize how, exactly, it feels _wrong_ but it does in a way that feels absolute and complete. You feel it twine into your very soul _(be sure to ask a BLi representative about a Soul Protection Plan if you're concerned. We can manage your lives and we can manage your afterlives, so why not let BLi be your god?)_ and take root there. And there it stays, that horrible, fraying sensation, like the ends of a braid being split apart.

Look into your ░░░░er's deadened eyes and accept the circumstances as they are. Accept them because you must. Because what possible thing can you do about your ░░░░er's prescribed adjustments, other than allow them to run their course? You hardly see h░░ anymore as it is.

Your mama barely gets any sleep. You know this because most nights she's usually awake by the time you head off to bed, and she's hasn't moved from her seat in the kitchenette when you wake up early to head to school the next morning. Sometimes you don't think she's moved at all in the intervening hours.

What can you do about it?

The only means you have are your fists, and the knowledge of a war that's still going - a war that they tell you Battery City is losing, which is why they need people like you to turn the tides. The warfare is chemical and ongoing and unrelenting and eating away at the desert and it won't be long until it breaches the city because in all the important ways, it already has and the people inside it have no idea. 

All you can do is fight and continue to fight. And if your ░░░░er never sees the war in h░░ life, you rationalize that ░e wouldn't be seeing much of you anyway. Once you're a real soldier, a real scarecrow, you assume you'll be out on the front. Fighting to keep h░░ and everyone else alive, safe in their way of life. Securing Battery City's victory.

Focus on _this_ feeling above all others, even if it lives as a muted flicker behind each breath. The knowledge that, if you _don't_ fight, if you don't become the strongest you can be, you might be the reason that the war manages to breach these city walls and reach your mother and your ░░░er.

You won't be the reason this war finds them, you decide. It's the one thing you can control - the one thing you can do on their behalf. It's a war that you don't think either of them realize _exists,_ and if you want to keep them safe, it's going to have to stay that way.

And that means you're going to have to be _Better._

**\--**

**yes, we mean you should avoid things with claws and fangs  
they are dangerous and only want to hurt you**

**\--**

You won't get further accustomed to being beaten. That's a poor attitude for a scarecrow to have, for a _soldier_ to have. They intend for you to be used in war, so you can't go into your classes feeling as though failure is acceptable. You've never had to try for something harder than simply _trying,_ and trying is no longer enough. Knowing now what's on the line, what choice do you have but to learn?

Here's how you put the full power of everything you have behind a punch: you move quick and you don't stop for anything and most of all you don't fight fair because _fair_ doesn't have a place in a fight and it doesn't have a place in war. Instructor Weaver taught you that with SCT-28 and SCT-11 and a smoking raygun that wasn't meant to be fired. People don't fight _fair_ ; they just fight to survive. That's the thing few of your other classmates get. Or if they do, they don't get it the way you do. They fight like they've been instructed to but that's never going to cut it. You don't come at them head-on. You come at them sideways and you don't stop until you've broken their guard and you know you'll never be penalized for fighting however you need to in order to win. You don't get points docked for clawing at another SCT's eyes, faking an injury, using someone else's lower gravity to your advantage. In a sparring drill your objective is to win so you win at any cost. That's what war is, isn't it? That's what they've been teaching you, hasn't it?

It's winning at _any_ cost.

"Point awarded to SCT-27," says Weaver. You're breathing a little heavy, winded after breaking SCT-25's guard with a sharp knee-strike to the chest that jarred his teeth in his jaw - you heard them clack audibly when the blow connected, and he's still huddled there coughing because getting the bony point of someone's knee in the diaphragm makes it hard to breathe for a few minutes afterward at the least. This you know from experience.

The thing about team drills is that they involve relying on the leaderboard cappers to not screw things up for the rest of you, and that doesn't usually happen. 06 and 28 always act with their own interests first; they see no issue in sacrificing the members of their teams like pawns, and they are never penalized for it, because again, that's the cost of war. In sparring drills like the ones your classes put you through now, you have no one to rely on but yourself. It's just you, acting solo, acting _quick._ You're faster than most. You're light on your feet; you don't plant your guard the way most do, the way you've been instructed to. You don't hit _hard_ yet but you know how to hit where it hurts because you've been paying attention when it comes to the SCT Program's extensive medical and biology units. It's not just knowing where things are but knowing the limitations of human physicality and the range of motion of all the joints and the pressure points that can make someone fold over in pain and stop trying to find the chinks in your stance. Here's the location of the brachial artery: curling down the ventral surface of the arm and splitting at the cubital fossa. Here's the best way to throw your punches: shoot for the chest or the ribs, your thumb folded across your fingers, aiming and hitting with your first two knuckles. Here's what you do if you're caught in a chokehold: kick for the posterior or anterior shin, forcing your opponent to shift so you can attack their stomach or groin with your elbows. Angle your chin and force it into the crook of their arm to limit the restriction of airflow.

Memorize pressure points on the human body. One sharp blow to the esophagus will lay someone out fast and limit how much air they can take in and win your fight for you, easy. A strike to the clavicle or kidneys can generate extreme pain and end a fight quickly. Move fast and keep them off balance. Don't let them think they can figure you out.

The next time you go up against SCT-28, she's fresh off a winning streak. She bounces a bit on the balls of her feet, shakes out her hands, and grins at you. She's riding the adrenaline high of her last victory. She's eager to fight you again. She's expecting another easy win, but it's been a few weeks since you've squared off and you've learned since then. She fights too straightforward and that makes it easy.

Weaver signals the start of the next set of matches with a sharp bark of, _"begin."_ Start by holding your ground because you know what 28 does, and that's charge right for you, headlong. She does that now. Sidestep, catch her upraised arm, whip your other arm around so you hammer the back of her neck with your elbow. It knocks her forward several paces and she stumbles, catches her breath, and whirls on you fast. You can already see her mentally calculating, adjusting her understanding of how you fight. Don't give her the time to. Push forward. She swings up a haymaker to try and smash you across the face. Duck the blow and head-butt her in the sternum, aiming for the clavicle. Bone-on-bone is always painful but the skull is sturdier by far than the collarbone.

She gasps once, in surprise and pain you think. Don't give her the chance to recover. Tackle her. Bring her crashing to the ground - don't pull your punches, make no attempt to cushion what the blow might do to her spine. You land on top of her and she snaps her arms around your torso and tries to squeeze, compress the air out of you, but you're faster and you ram your arm down over her throat and press down. _Hard._

She's working with a worse position than you are. You're strangling her slowly. Her face is already darkening as her mouth gapes pointlessly open, compulsively trying and failing to take in air.

"Match ended," says Weaver, who is now standing mere feet away, watching. "Point awarded to SCT-27."

Release 28 and stand. You have to breathe deep, suck fresh air into your lungs after SCT-28's frantic attempt to crush the breath out of your chest, but your heartbeat is already re-regularizing.

You just beat SCT-28 in under thirty seconds flat.

Her hatred is a leucotome to the back of your neck, the molecules in the air atomizing beneath the ferocity of her glower. It's not hard to guess why. It was a quick win, and more than that, you humiliated her. You mopped the floor with her.

Don't acknowledge her. Stand at parade rest and listen to Instructor Weaver inform you that your technique was atypical, but highly effective - something that is fast becoming ordinary praise for you. 

It's not until you face SCT-06 that it becomes evident that this, more than anything, is where you've been destined to truly _win._ 06 fights with less finesse and strategy than 28, but he makes up for it with brute force and a stubborn refusal to back down. He's not crafty though, and he's not smart enough to adapt to your tactics. You goad him easily into charging for you, trip him, send him skidding across the floor by sheer virtue of his momentum. It's easy enough to keep him down after that, wrists pinned to his back with one hand and the other on the base of his neck, threatening to mash his face further into the sparring mat.

_Match ended. Point awarded to SCT-27._

Wait for your strategies to start getting easier to anticipate, for 06 or 28 to start finding more inventive ways to counter you. They don't.

_Match ended. Point awarded to SCT-27._

Little by little, your score is edging its way higher and higher.

_Match ended. Point awarded to SCT-27._

You're decent in team drills and you'll never be the _best_ where long-range shooting is concerned, but as far as hand-to-hand drills go, you're unmatched. You do well in medical and you're recognized for your initiative. Stop drawing the line at merely succeeding and begin aiming instead to _excel._

_Match ended. Point awarded to SCT-27._

A week later, you've bested SCT-06 enough times to secure his place on the leaderboard for yourself. 

He takes this poorly.

06 and 28 seem to conspire to deliberately hamper you whenever they can - as the second leaderboard head, you replace 06's role as leader during team drills, and even when 06 is assigned to your unit, it feels as though he's doing everything he can to hamper your chances at victory.

Retaliate by relegating him to the status of cannon fodder whenever necessary. If he didn't want to be expendable, perhaps he should be more cooperative.

Three weeks later, dislodge SCT-28 from her crowning position on the leaderboard and assume her position instead.

**\--**

**young one  
everything in this forest needs to be killed**

**\--**

At twelve years old, you're undefeated at the top of the SCT leaderboard and downright feared when it comes to CQC drills. Your class is down to nineteen students and it's you and SCT-28 running things during team drills. SCT-06 still makes your life difficult, courtesy of you bumping him down to third. 28 still speaks to you with a sneer in her voice.

You still leave them bruised and cursing you during hand-to-hand.

You are twelve years old, and this is what you know:

How to arm a B7 dual-purpose fragmentation-smoke grenade, and the minimum distance it needs to be thrown to ensure it does not include you in its blast radius. How to do long division in your head, applied trigonometry while in a live-fire course. That it's friction and vibration in a battery cable over time that's one of the most reliable killers of a well-oiled car wiring job. How hard you need to throw a twelve-inch carbon-steel alloy combat knife to put it in the center of someone's skull. What a stun mine does to you when you can't disable it fast enough. The exact feel of a BL/ind-sanctioned Individual raygun against your palms, still too large for you to hold it with the intended one-handed grip, and the way it kicks slightly with each shot. Newton's laws of motion (by heart). The place where you'd need to squeeze someone's airways in the right way so you can asphyxiate them quickly. How to hotwire a gas-powered moving vehicle. What each of the parts of a gas-powered engine do and which ones can be disabled to leave the vehicle dead in the sands. Where gas comes from (Refinica, Wyoming) and how it's gotten to be so valuable in the desert (because actual decent fuel is rare and most of the desert rebels and killjoys have to make do with cheap knock-offs and watered-down alternatives that kill their engines and smoke their vehicles from the inside out). How to work a standard carbon-plastic BLi-issue body bag (set internal temperature to 98.6 degrees exactly when inserting subject) and how said body bag preserves a dead body from the elements. How that dead body can still be useful in a war that sits at Battery City's doorstep. You're going to fight in a war that turns body counts into advantages, on a side whose most primary and plentiful footsoldiers are carrion.

It's not long after you turn twelve that the SCT Program adds another responsibility to your list.

"This," says Instructor Weaver, "is an SCT companion. And for the next two years, it will be your personal responsibility."

She calls it an SCT companion, but to you it looks an awful lot like a dog.

You've never seen a dog up close, not personally. These ones look no different than the ones you're accustomed to glimpsing in the city, albeit rarely - short-haired, black-and-tan, with large dark eyes and long snouts and very pink tongues. You weren't aware that they had a function in the SCT Program. You were never informed of their function at all, though you've seen them accompanying exterminator patrols on occasion. They're useful for law enforcement, you recall learning in your old school, but that's the extent of what you know. These ones must be very young; they're small, their barks are higher-pitched, and their paws are much too large for them.

"The purpose of this is to teach you how to work with and train a canine who will work in enforcement alongside you, as well as an understanding of reliability and consistency," says Weaver. "Upon completion of the SCT Program, you will be of a much higher rank than any common second-tier exterminator or third-tier draculoid. You must grow accustomed to being liable for other lives at _all_ hours of the day, and you must grow accustomed to these lives being _expendable._ You are not," says Weaver, gazing sternly at each and every one of her remaining trainees, "to grow attached to your SCT companion. By _any_ metric."

SCT-06 has already crouched down in front of his designated companion, scratching it behind the ears.

"I'm gonna call mine _Hyperspeed,"_ he says.

"That's a dumb name," says SCT-28. "And isn't naming it the _opposite_ of what you're supposed to do? You don't wanna get _attached,_ do you?"

"I'm not attached," says 06, noncommittal. "It's a name. It makes _sense_ to name it."

SCT-28 makes a low, dismissive noise with her throat, staring at her SCT companion with an expression that you feel is best classed as "disgust."

"Hey," says 06. _"Hey,_ what about you, Neon? What're you gonna name _yours?"_

You can't tell why they've taken to demanding your attention more and more often now. They do it in unison, tag-teaming you regularly even if all they can manage are harsh words and the ongoing threat of their respective positions on the leaderboard just beneath you. You assume it's to take the edge off your repeated wins against them; you're not so naive as to mistake it for respect. But it's a familiarity that feels like it should run counter to everything else they do to make your life miserable. It shouldn't bother you because it's not any particular deviation from their past treatment of you.

Except it is, in small and inescapable ways. Before, 06 and 28 were quantifiably rude to you, certainly, but they were so in a way that made perfect sense. The low-grade contempt they carried for you was indistinguishable from that which they directed toward everyone else. But now, since you toppled them both from their heights on the leaderboard, they've taken a special delight in making things difficult for you in particular. They've singled you out, made you a priority. You don't just have their casual, baseline cruelty and ridicule - now, you also have their attention. They call you _Neon Rat_ and try to kick you when you're down and go out of their way for you. They taunt you relentlessly when you make even the slightest error, when you consistently mix up _cobra_ and _kobura_ during English. They reach into the pit of you and gouge out your insecurities before you yourself have even come to understand them, and bare them for the entire class to see.

It's the most care anyone outside of your mother and your ░░░░er has ever expressed to you. Because even if they're focusing on you to hurl insults and get underneath your skin, at least they're making time for you. You're their special target, when you've never been someone's anything before - not when your mama barely sees you anymore, not when your ░░░er now drifts like an automaton through each day, h░░ perpetual fire seemingly snuffed out, and not when your own position on the leaderboard in training is so precarious and liable to be yanked out from underneath you at the slightest misstep.

It's for this reason that you feel compelled to answer when 06 asks the question. You consider it for a moment, regarding your own allotted companion with all the practiced neutrality you can muster (you've grown so accustomed to locking everything beneath a flat veneer so no one can read any insight into your tactics, your plans, or emotions that you don't, in principle, have). Already the dog's tail is whisking back and forth. Its mouth flops open, exposing a wide, pink tongue as it pants contentedly at you.

"Jackson," you say.

"That's an even dumber name than _his,"_ snorts SCT-28, jerking her head at 06. He's on his stomach, letting his companion try to fit its soft, gummy teeth around his fingertips, and clearly isn't listening. "What if it's a girl?"

"Jackson," you answer again, extending a hand for your new responsibility to sniff. It does so, pressing its wet, warm nose to your fingertips. It startles you, the sensation of hot breath against your fingertips. Its tongue is slimier than you expect when it swipes it over your fingers.

"What's wrong with you?" says 28, her contempt scathing in its tonelessness. _"Both_ of you."

SCT-06 smirks.

You run your hand tentatively down your SCT companion's rough, bristly back. The puppy's flank trembles in delight as its tail wags ever harder.

"Hi, Jackson," you whisper.

The puppy tilts its head to one side, its dark eyes shining, and...

Recognize that you might be in trouble.

**\--**

**they’re dangerous  
too dangerous to live**

**\--**

Caring for a growing dog is a constant and unrelenting exercise and you think that's probably the point of it. The dog requires exercise, enrichment, food, space. Before long you're doing laps in the mornings with the animals at your side and teaching yourself how best to school your SCT companion into obedience the way the SCT Program has you. Your mama doesn't question why you come home with your white uniform coated in thin, dark speckles of dog hair or why sometimes you smell of vomit or pre-moistened kibble, just like how she never questions the bruises or the shaking hands or the slick of sweat sticking your hair to the nape of your neck. Like you, she's smart enough to know not to question things.

All SCT companions are kept in on-site kennels when not in active use. You engage with your companion in obedience training on top of caring and feeding, coupled with your regular duties.

It takes less than a week for nearly every trainee in your class to have discretely named their SCT companions. They know better than to call them aloud by said names when Instructor Weaver is nearby, for the most part, but you hear them whispering them, exchanging earnest pets and murmurs of affection when they think no one else will notice.

Jackson, as it turns out, is a girl. This doesn't change your chosen name for her. Giving her a name at all was a mistake, because you can feel it now - that corkscrew in your chest that feels like a knife being lodged just beneath your sternum, working itself deeper in a steady downward progression with each passing day. It's continuous and unavoidable as it festers with a raw, persistent ache. 

That's not what arrests you.

What really gets to you is how familiar the feeling is. It's as familiar as the route you take to school or the shape of your ░░░░er's silhouette in the bed across from yours. It's memorized your neural pathways and lights them up in recognizable currents. It buzzes like a continuous tone that lives in an empty room; a thing that was always present, always _there,_ but has only now become something you recognized.

Bury it. Disregard it.

Ignore it.

You perform well. You're still at the peak of the leaderboard. You're speeding through your training. Learn how to make a gas-powered motor work in as short a time as possible with as few resources on hand as possible, because when you're in the desert that's the most reliable forms of transport. Learn how to shoot better, how to take down opponents faster, how to teach a dog to bite and latch their teeth into a limb and not let go. Learn that the type of dogs the SCT Program uses are bred to have the kind of jaw strength capable of punching through sheet metal. Accept that Jackson, with the training issued to her through you, will be capable of puncturing arteries, shredding muscles, exposing bone, and permanently damaging a target's mobility with one well-placed bite. 

Get better and better at wiping the floor with your fellow trainees when they come up against you in CQC drills.

Your class numbers at nineteen trainees now. You don't fear the ever-dwindling number the way you did, not now that you're at the top of the leaderboard. Don't stop long enough to examine what it does to you, the occasional realization that one of the seats near you is empty and will remain empty from here on out. You don't know what happens to the dogs of the trainees who wash out, and you know better than to ask.

Not long after that, Weaver has a high-ranking scarecrow speak to your class about the importance of your training. You don't recognize her, but you recognize the deference Weaver displays to her. She treats the scarecrow with respect, almost reverence.

"To fight as a first-tier scarecrow is an incredible honor," says the scarecrow without preamble as she addresses your class. Scarecrow Fume's hair is an evenly cut bob that's sheared off at her chin so perfectly that it doesn't look quite real. This, along with the high, prominent edges of her cheekbones, lend her the look of something that walked off a BLi automaton factory line.

She was designed, the way the rest of you are being designed, to operate at peak efficiency - to give orders, to stalk and maim and kill, to do whatever is necessary to win the war boiling out in the desert beyond Battery City's peaceful walls.

The class stands at attention as Fume speaks with her hands behind her back. Each SCT companion sits obediently at attention beside their designated trainee. They've been growing larger and larger with each passing day, and the ones who would not acquiesce to obedience conditioning at first have since succumbed. It's difficult for them not to when prong collars and choke chains wait to correct unruly behavior. 

(Remember it: the breathy wheeze of Jackson's breath getting sharper and shorter while the chain drew tighter. The snarl and the vice-trap of teeth closing around a training dummy's arm and the crack of synthetic bone. Seek target. Impact weapon. Bite-and-hold.) 

(Accept its necessity.)

"The Analog Wars," says Fume, "are one of the most important conflicts this generation will ever witness. After your final tests, you will complete your training, enter the frontlines, and make history."

Final tests will be completed at age fourteen, after which you will enter full-time training. You've not yet had it explained to you what that might entail, though you think you can guess. You're less than two years out from finals, now. If you can keep this up, you'll graduate with a higher score than anybody in your class. You'll be the highest ranked.

And nothing will be capable of hurting you or your mama or your ░░░░er again.

Fume tells all of you about the kinds of things you will face on the frontlines. She tells you about how the desert is separated into distinct war zones, concentric circles that emanate out from Battery City. Combat Zone One, for example, is closest to the city and where most of the fighting has taken place, though many of the opposing forces tend to scatter and take refuge in the more distant Combat Zones. She tells you about the effectiveness of concentrated bursts of mortar fire and high-powered nuclear bombs and the use of draculoids in the field. She tells you that the fight will oftentimes take you back into the Battery, when rebels attempt to breach the city line in order to hide or to raise support from within. Some of her most important missions have been carried out within Battery City walls, she tells you. But once you pass your finals, you'll be primed for it. You'll receive the highest quality bio-augmentations that BL/ind can provide for the members of its most dedicated elite soldiers, and this combined with your training will make you the most effective force known to any.

Then she has you divide into teams to engage in another combat exercise for her evaluation.

A real scarecrow is watching. Don't slip up now.

You're set to lead one half of the class, with SCT-28 leading the other. The class is uneven, but as you rank higher than SCT-28, your team gets the extra pair of legs.

"War isn't fair," says Fume. "The other side will be better equipped, and have better numbers. It is your duty to do the most with what you _have."_

It's because of this that you end up with SCT-06 on your side. You're not looking forward to dealing with him and his SCT companion sabotaging your efforts yet again. Already you're carding through the possible ways to mitigate his efforts, to sideline him to some part of the battlefield where he can do the least damage to you and the rest of your team, but you have fewer numbers now that your class has shrunk and it's getting hard to think of strategies that will account for 06's subversive nature.

"Are you ready to _lose,_ Neon?" 06 purrs, sounding unimaginably pleased with himself. Doubtless he's figured out your conundrum already. He's proven himself more than willing to take the hit to his score if it sinks yours as well; as long as 06 function, he'll never really fall from the leaderboard entirely. You can't do very much about that.

What you _can_ do is make it worth his while to work with _you_ instead.

Jerk your chin in the vague direction of the classroom, where the leaderboard sits mounted and waiting.

"You want second?" you ask him. 

Three words are all it takes.

Because SCT-06 is third on the leaderboard, beneath SCT-28 and you respectively, and it's taking a risk, preying on a preexisting relationship that is stronger by far than any other in the program with you, but it's the only idea you have. The aim of the program is perfection, which means that after a certain point, one can't concern themselves with others. You've known that, and so you haven't, but 06 and 28 seem to have considered each other exempt from this.

06's eyes light up, and he leans forward.

"You've got a _plan?"_ he says, and he sounds genuinely eager.

You don't end up getting him onto the second place leaderboard spot, but you do up his point score so that he's hovering only just beneath 28. He seems to consider that a win enough. Two weeks later, when he _does_ manage to usurp SCT-28 and claim second place, she's placed on your team during the next stage of team exercises. You make her the same offer. Begrudgingly, she takes it. 

In a week, she reclaims her position. By that point, it's probably obvious to them both what you're doing: using the competitive strictures of the program to make their friendly rivalry work to your advantage. But if they know, they don't say anything about it. They don't seem to care.

**\--**

**yes, we mean this forest that you are in  
yes, we mean this forest we will not let you leave**

**\--**

So you're first on the leaderboard with SCT-06 and SCT-28 bouncing erratically between the second and third positions just beneath. You manage to sustain a healthy lead over them up until the point where everything changes in a way that you don't think anyone managed to predict:

The Wars end.

You only hear about it in vague terms after an early city-wide curfew interrupts the routine trajectory of your week. In class the next day, you hear about it in snatches of whispers between the other SCTs. Instructor Weaver doesn't offer much: she only says that the Wars are over because the leader of the other side has been caught and subdued, but that this won't affect your training or your eventual positions as scarecrows.

You're not sure what she means by that. If you're not being made for war, what else are scarecrows made for?

It's a question you know better than to ask.

Classes don't stop. Drills don't slow down. If anything, they get more intensive. Now you have to worry about SC-issue flash grenades and stun mines being frequently planted on the course during live-fire exercises, hidden precision shooters taking careful aim at trainees during reps and cutting them down with well-placed stun rounds. Odds start getting stacked against you. _Be ready for anything,_ is what your training means to teach you. Take your companion's health into account, always, because that's a priority - injuries to your SCT companion will reflect poorly on overall scores. Everything is tallied, tabulated, calculated. Whether you indulge in a wasteful expenditure of weapon battery life during team exercises. Whether you take unnecessary risks. How well you follow orders.

Always, how well you follow orders.

With the Wars over, more of the scarecrows on the front lines can be recalled to help oversee training for SCT classes. Fume assists Instructor Weaver on occasion, but there's no regularity to it. Learn not to try to anticipate when classes might be diverted into something more intensive to better showcase your skills to scarecrows, when they're there.

Their advice comes from the frontlines. Get used to making tactical sacrifices. Draculoids are cannon fodder, exterminators slightly more competent cannon fodder. It is equipment failure, not combat KIAs, that the program cites as the leading cause of death for scarecrows in the field - when their many bio-augmentations happen to perform inadequately, or cause some tiny malfunction that costs a soldier everything.

It's Scarecrow Piston who issues that statistic. Piston is a hulk of a man who stands at six-foot-eight and you know that height's not all natural, not based on the way he walks. He says outright that he has a synthetic lung and three artificial vertebrae. At a little over thirty years old, he's probably the oldest scarecrow you've ever seen. He looks older. The pale tissue battered into his features, the surgical scars that you see peaking out from underneath his jacket sleeves, wrapped around the base of his wrist and creeping down the inside of his forearm, it all makes him look older. Most of the scarring has been ironed away by countless surgeries, but when you're close enough, you can still see the pale threads scalpel cuts and smoothed-over flesh.

He only stops by for instruction once, but the look of him stays with you. When you think of scarecrows, it's Piston you remember. Piston and Fume, and the first scarecrow you ever properly met, right after SCT-11 took the hit that dropped her from the program.

That scarecrow's name, you learn, is Korse.

"Your class marks the beginning of Class Four of scarecrow production," he tells your class before team exercises, one of the few times he appears to oversee training. He speaks dully, like he's reciting the words from memory. "You have already received an even higher quality education than that of your predecessors. Do not squander it."

He looks you in the eyes when he says it. It's hard to look away. Strain to communicate through your silence, through your unchanging expression, through _anything_ possible, that you _won't_ squander this. You won't.

_You won't._

**\--**

**the things are so dangerous, young one  
yes, we mean things like you**

**\--**

06 and 28 don't hate you anymore, but what they are now is almost as bad. You're their balancing act. You're aware, of course, that they're both attempting to use you to claw their way up the board. If they can't beat you fairly, they seem to have settled for beating each other instead. They still call you _Neon,_ but they do it with less venom than before. And, more importantly, neither attempt to undermine you during team exercises unless they're actually on the other side.

You are thirteen years old, first on the leaderboard for a year and counting, and this is what you know:

How to break someone's neck. The exact tint of the white polymer finish on the casing of BL/ind-sanctioned armaments beneath the overhead fluorescent lights. What a draculoid mask does to the human soul (though not where the soul ends up). How to resuscitate someone when they stop breathing. The fastest way to calculate the time of day based on the position of the sun. How to shoot an EX-22 battle rifle. The shape and size of Battery City, how to navigate its streets and tunnel underpasses, how far it is to other capitals like Refinica and Sympathy Junction from here. Where to put a twelve-inch blade to end a fight and exterminate a target quickly (fourth lumbar down and to the left a little, aiming for the abdominal aorta; it takes you hours of practice until you can get the angle just right on instinct). That it's safer, in close quarters, to go for the heart than it is the spine or the throat. How to shell a spent battery pack and slot in a new one with fluid precision. How long the human body can survive without oxygen. How long the human body can survive without food. How quickly a desert runner will die of thirst or heat exhaustion.

Who takes care of the dogs when the trainees are at home.

The last one you find out entirely by accident, and mostly because you missed the last maglev rail back to the Neon District and you're delaying the long, inevitable trudge back home. Your ribs are aching from CQC drills today, where SCT-28 nearly managed to beat you with a vicious battering to your chest. You put her down in short order, but you're not looking forward to the lengthy walk and how badly it's going to chafe all the while.

You're sat just outside the SCT building, breathing through the lingering throbbing with one arm folded around your abdomen.

 _"Fucking_ hell." You don't recognize the voice, but by reflex you go still and press up against the nearest wall. Here's how to walk quietly: try to land on the outermost edge of your feet, rolling the rest of your weight down slowly. Do it carefully enough and no one will hear you coming.

"What?" You recognize the other voice easily. Scarecrow Fume has only assisted with your class a handful of times, but the hardness in her tone is unmistakable. 

"Requisitions is run by _dumbasses,_ is what," is the growled-out answer. "Every time. _Every time_ I submit an equipment request, they give me more dog food on top of it. Do they understand how much shelf space this stuff eats up?"

"Can you blame them?" Fume's voice is steel shrouded in something low and purring. "There's a surplus."

"I _know_ there's a surplus. There's _been_ a surplus. Ever since the Battery was _built,_ there's been a surplus of _fucking_ dog food. Like the whole thing was _made_ on the stuff. 'Course the fuckers need to foist it off on me every chance they get, like my cupboards at home aren't already _overflowing_ with this shit."

"You take some of it home?"

"You have to, when you're dealing with injury," comes the gruff reply. "Doesn't happen often, but it happens. Little idiots don't know how to manage their new responsibility and they get their dog's leg sprained in a team-on-team exercise."

"Their _companion's_ leg."

"Whatever."

"The point is that they think of them as expendable, same as anyone. That's what being a scarecrow is."

"You don't have to tell _me._ How many trainees in _your_ class washed out during finals?"

You don't mean to stick around and listen to something that's clearly above your ranking. But there's nowhere else to go, and they don't know you're here. You find yourself leaning forward regardless, straining to pick up whatever Fume says next.

If no one knows you're nearby and if no one's going to bother attempting to limit who might listen to their conversation, you can't be blamed for what you might hear.

"Almost all of them," says Fume. "It's one of the most common failure states. They're given the order and they can't follow through with it. No second chances after that - you fuck that up, you're bleached and scrubbed out of the program. They keep saying they've gotten better after the Class Twos, but I'll believe it when I see it. They practically _spoiled_ the Threes, and look how well _that_ turned out."

 _Bleached._ You've heard that word before. It means re-education. You've never seen your classmates since their exits from the SCT Program. Determine that you're not particularly shocked to learn that they have most of their experiences wiped. What good would it do a civilian to know how to disarm someone, or how to direct two bands of draculoids to flank a target?

"Not like there's a shortage of the things here." Whoever Fume's talking to doesn't sound surprised. "Dogs _or_ the shit they need to operate at peak. They're like dracs that way."

"Though not quite as dumb, and about twice as useful," says Fume. The words are faintly amused. "Just as replaceable, though. Useful in the field. And once trainees get through it, they don't miss them."

"More easily replaceable than trainees?"

"That's the idea." Fume laughs, though the sound is choppy and devoid of much in the way of mirth. "We were made for this. If a trainee gets the order to waste their SCT companion and they hesitate, that's how you know they're doomed to fail on the field. No room for sentiment on the frontlines."

Something in you twinges against this, like a poked nerve. The words settle up against the back of your throat and the inside of your rib cage. It makes sense, you tell yourself. Losses are inevitable in war. But you're not _in_ a war anymore. That's the point. 

Part of you wants to demand what it is Scarecrow Fume is suggesting, because she can't possibly _mean_ it. _Waste._ You know the word. You're familiar with the word. It's scarecrow slang for _kill._ The first and most common form of dead that exists in the Combat Zones. You've been taught that those who live outside city lines call it _ghosting_ or _dusting_ or _x-ing,_ any number of vulgar synonyms.

Try to picture it. Picture - closing your hands around Jackson's thin, furred neck and squeezing. Maybe twisting hard enough for the bone to pop. It wouldn't be hard. She's grown in the year that you've taken care of her; just about everyone's SCT companions are adults now, and ready to operate in the field. But they're not as resilient as the human body is. A blast to the cranium, or to the abdomen. Even less, if you would want to avoid use of excess battery power.

They said not to get attached. Weaver told all the SCTs, specifically, not to get attached. And you'd failed right from the start. You'd given your companion a name. But what did they expect? You've fed her, brushed her, walked her, cared for her, trained alongside her. She knows your signals and she obeys them easily. You did a good job with her. You _wanted_ to do a good job with her.

Didn't you?

You could do it, you tell yourself. You could.

You're thirteen years old. In about nine months, you'll be completing your SCT finals.

You'll have to.

**\--**

**nothing good lives in this forest  
that’s why we won’t let anything leave**

**\--**

Your ░░░░er disappears again. Back to re-education, your mama says. She looks tired, dark patches ringing her eyes when she says it. She says ░e'll probably be gone a little longer than usual. But ░░e'll be back in no time, she insists.

There's a tremor in the words when she says them.

What else is there to do, though, but run the drills your classes demand of you? You're still at the top of the leaderboard. You still have SCT-06 and SCT-28 jockeying for the position just beneath you. They treat you with a tangible rapport now, two parts sneers and one part a begrudging respect, or at least as close as they can get to it. If they can't beat you, they'll settle for being your second best, turning outright insubordination into barbed remarks and quietly resenting you for it.

You watch them during reps and when you get team exercises, you watch the way they work with their companions. They've trained them well - both animals respond well to their commands and 28's can even maul other SCTs to grab their weapons and leave them defenseless. They treat them with a slightly warmer affectation than they do most others, each other included. 06 scratches the back of his companion's ears and whispers to the animal when he thinks no one's listening. You've glimpsed it once or twice, though the last time you saw it happen 06 threatened to beat the shit out of you.

As if he could.

Your ░░░er is still in re-education and there are only sixteen of you left in your class out of the initial spread of thirty-two. Your numbers have been halved and you haven't even hit finals yet. 

Don't think of what you're going to do once you hit that final test. Don't think of Jackson. 

Try not to think of Jackson during classes, during drills, but she presses her soft, wet nose against your hand and then licks it and her tail wags happily whenever you see her, so how, exactly, are you supposed to _not_ think of her? Try to visualize what it would feel like to be the reason her heart stops beating. Try to imagine the weight that would have and how it would sit in your soul.

You're at the top of the leaderboard. Scarecrow Fume singled you out last time she oversaw classes, and told you that you had a sort of _special promise_ and it clenched a transient knot of warm contentment in the center of you.

You're at the top of the leaderboard. You're unchallenged. Your position is secure.

There are two of you, you think sometimes. There's the version of you that exists when you're in your classes, and there's the version of you that exists when you're at home. There's the you that knows how to do applied physics on the fly and how to twist the bone of the neck to snap it as quickly and painlessly as possible, and there's the you that smiles absently, patiently, when your mama sets food on the table and tells you to eat it before it gets cold.

The other you, the one you don't spend as much time with, the one that exists only when you're home and, fleetingly, when you're in that blurred transitional state as you ride the maglev to and from your classes, is getting harder and harder to track. You're so tired when you come home, every time. You step through the door and let the wave of exhaustion hit you once you cross the threshold and you lose yourself in it. Drop into bed, put on your headphones, let that mire creep up over your eyes and shoulders and drown you until the following day, when the cycle repeats. It's easier to recognize that piece of yourself when there's someone else there to acknowledge him, but your mama has always been distant, you're too young to have ever met your father, and your ░░░░er is...gone, still. In re-education. 

░e'll be back soon, your mama says. She always says that.

It'd be nice if she was right.

You don't know who you are when ░░e's gone anymore.

**\--**

**young one, why are you looking at us like that?  
why are you barring your fangs, slashing your claws?**

**\--**

Your ░░░er does come back, though ░e comes back different. Something always changes about h░░ when ░░e comes back from re-education. Quieter, more prone to sleeping through the night instead of waking up thrashing like normal. You're not sure if the stint in re-education was successful or not, because you don't see your mama or your ░░░░er very much these days. It's nice to have someone else in your room again, the familiar imprint of h░░ shadow lumped beneath the sheets in the bed across from yours, but your ░░░er doesn't say anything to you when ░e looks at you with dulled eyes and sallow features.

One night, when sleep doesn't come easily, you climb out of your bed and sit beside your ░░░░er's, staring at h░░ while ░░e sleeps. ░e looks like you in small ways, not obvious ones. You have the same dark hair. H░░ is a few shades darker, almost black. Your eyes are shaped the same - like your mama's, slender with monolids, though your ░░░er's are a little paler. It's in the shape of your faces, too, the angle of your cheekbones. But you're already getting taller while ░░e's stayed the same size since ░e turned fourteen, much h░░ chagrin.

Picture closing your hands around h░░ neck and squeezing. Picture it the way you pictured it for Jackson. Try to imagine what it would be like, to watch the life go out from your ░░░░er's eyes and to be the reason it happens. ░░e would fight it. ░e would fight it with everything ░░e has, kicking and screaming and swearing and maybe ░e'd even stand a chance against you, but as scrappy as your ░░░░er is ░e's never been in the SCT Program so you know without question that you'd win.

Picture yourself being the reason that your ░░░er goes still and quiet: a snapped neck, fingerprint bruises clamped up around h░░ throat. Visualize it. Imagine it, every tiny detail.

Imagine the hole that it would put in your soul.

_The point is that they think of them as expendable, same as anyone. That's what being a scarecrow is._

You fought for this, though. You fought tooth and nail to claw your way to the top of the SCT leaderboard. You were going to fight in the Wars sitting at Battery City's doorstep, and ensure that they never touched the only two people in your life who meant anything to you: your mama and your ░░░░er. You were going to be the best scarecrow you could be because that had been the only way forward for you, if it meant protecting the people in your life. You're being driven by emotion. _That doesn't make for an optimal performance._ The waves of breaking anger are what cause slip-ups in drills; your pathological calm is how you've beaten SCT-28 and her simmering envy, and SCT-06 and his short temper. You can't lose track of that now.

Your ░░░er is out like a light, sleeping deeply, deeper than ░░e ever did before re-education. You brush a few locks of hair from h░░ eyes, but ░e doesn't stir.

Carefully, slowly, reach up and fit your hands around the slim arch of h░░ neck. 

Just to see how it feels.

░e's home and ░░e's more than that. ░e's your ░░░░er and the only constant you've ever had. Home is the uneven dip in the crumbled front step to the apartment building and it's the smell of the cheap detergent your mama uses for everything. Home is your ░░░er's tiny act of rebellion of cracking the window open just a hair and h░░ grin at you when the city ambience filters in through it. 

But above everyone else, home is h░░. Your ░░░░er. Incorrigible and irrepressible and irresponsible and capable of so much hurt but with a smile so large that it crinkles the corners of h░░ eyes and scrunches them up into half-moons. Home is the way ░░e grins at you and in moments like, for just a moment, the static in the bone cave of your chest flutters out and something inside you loosens.

That's home.

Then your ░░░er stirs and exhales, and you're back in your own bed and under the covers in half a second. Your heart jackrabbits furiously against your ribs. Reach up, press trembling fingers to your mouth. Fight back the urge to vomit.

Come away from that night with no sleep and one bitter, belated realization:

That you cannot simultaneously be both a good scarecrow and a good brother.

Wrestle with this. Try to internalize it. Swallow it like a daily prescription, let the chalky taste breed under your tongue and inflame your guts. Breathe it out even though it ignites a heat your veins, pounds your heart faster, makes the backs of your eyelids tingle.

For the first time in your life, think to yourself: _what am I going to do?_

Panic lasts for as long as it takes for you to press your fist to your mouth, bite into the skin of your knuckles until you taste red and copper. Think of your ░░░░er. Think of Jackson. Think of SCT-11. Think of SCT-28 and SCT-06 and how they've never balked at anything the program has demanded of them. Think of Scarecrow Fume, and her words - what you'll be required to do to progress through the program you were _selected_ for. Think of the scarecrows you've seen and the way they've been made better, _stronger,_ for what they had to endure to get to where they are now. Think of every SCT from your class who's washed out.

Think -

Think of nothing.

Steady your breathing. Focus.

Accept your place in things. Do what you've always done. Listen to your superiors. You can do this. You've always done it just fine. You can do this.

And you do. 

Until the day your mama disappears for good.

**\--**

**this is exactly what we mean  
everything in this forest wants to hurt us  
everything in this forest needs to be killed**

**\--**


	2. put the jabberwock's cadaver with derelict juvenile (oh, i'm feeling <self> destructive)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been agonizing over this chapter for a while now. It still doesn't feel quite right to me, but once again I'm forced to simply bite the bullet and post it anyway.
> 
> Content warnings for this chapter! 
> 
> We're going to see the continued exploration of similar themes from the previous chapter - the existence of a very abusive and punitive environment, and the effects of this environment on the development of very young characters. There will continue to be mentions of animal cruelty and animal death, though nothing explicit is portrayed. Incidental misgendering is present in this chapter as well, though again it is obscured as much as possible. A few characters will on occasion make use of self-harm as a stabilizing tactic. This chapter also delves deeper into some more canon-typical themes, namely those that would be associated with Battery City's brainwashing, memory-wiping, and forced medication of civilians (including young children) and the mindset that would logically result from that.
> 
> This chapter will see the exploration of themes of grief and mourning. There will be mentions (though no explicit portrayals) of nonconsensual and invasive medical procedures. There will be mentions and implications of eye horror in particular. Nothing explicit is depicted, but it is discussed. There are some graphic descriptions of dead bodies and the natural processes that tend to affect them postmortem. This chapter also contains a warning for emetophobia, as a few characters suffer nausea and vomiting at several points.

**\--**

**the day the window grew till it no longer fit the house  
was the night I decided to leave.**

**\--**

It's never been a mystery to you why your ░░░░░er was passed over for the SCT Program and you were not. You passed the SCE6 with high marks, and ░░e didn't. You never asked how ░e did on h░░ SCE6, and no one ever told you what kinds of differences spanned the gap between the two of you. You don't ask why ░░░░er is in and out of re-education, getting in trouble for fights and not paying attention in class while your qualities - your persistent quiet and tendency to count stray objects into categories - are seen as acceptable, even desirable traits for a prospective scarecrow.

The differences between you have always been an unspoken given, and it was never your place to question how deeply those lines have been drawn. They're never questions you'd see answered in your classes, or at home. Once, you might have bothered your mama with the question of why you ended up in the SCT program as an ideal candidate and why your ░░░░er is, in every way, your opposite. 

But then your ░░░░░er gets in another fight at school that lands h░░ in re-education and requires your mama to talk to some BLi doctors for several long hours away from home. You're not privy to the details of what _happened_ and you're not actually sure who she has to talk to. You get a note on the fridge when you leave for school that morning that informs you that there probably won't be anyone home by the time you get back.

Instead of hurrying to the last maglev home after classes, you linger. You're sore from today's drills, your mind buzzing and overstuffed with the effort of memorizing today's lessons. Even if the Analog Wars are over, you still have to learn everything in the curriculum: tactics, strategies, how to survive in the desert's Combat Zones. Regardless of the state of the Wars, there are still stragglers living in the desert, revolutionaries who persist in the dust and heat and sit spewing their toxic ideologies into pirate airwaves, and it's the job of scarecrows to clean them up.

Scarecrows like you.

Scarecrows like the one you're going to be.

Watch the rest of your class traipse out into the city streets. There are only fourteen of you now. SCT-06 and SCT-28 are among the last to leave the building. They're whispering, nudging one another with companionable ease, when they depart, but 28 stops and cocks her head at you when she notices you dithering.

"What're you up to, Neon?" She says it with a sneer, like always. Catch yourself tracking the minute details in her face as you look at her, the pinches and creases to her features. Lydia Gates. She's thirteen like you, but she doesn't look thirteen. There's a pall to the shadows in her eyes and the set of her shoulders that makes her seem older. How old are you now, by technicality? How much older has the SCT program made you?

Her hair, shorn close to her skull per SCT standard, looks too bright and too violently orange to be natural, but it is. The only hair dyes that exist in Battery City are in pre-approved colors: varying shades of black and brown and blonde. Strawberry blondes like her are rare, but not unheard of. The radioactive brightness to Gates' hair is a testament to the kind of district she grew up in, where parents in the West Sector can afford the highest quality gene augments and get to quirk their children's alleles in any way they choose within BLi's restrictions. You learned about the history of Battery City genetic politicking in SCT classes. Back when it when it was just _the Battery,_ a commercial hub established in the desert of Old California, Better Living Industries would offer company credit rewards for citizens willing to trial run genetic modifications. It made an already diverse population even more wide-ranging in certain physical characteristics, and as it happened, those genes could be passed on to following generations. It was the lower-income households that were the most viable human testers. They had more to gain and less to lose.

Now that those trial periods are years in the past, gene-aug children are a particular mark of status. They're not the patchworked calicos or heterochromatic jumbles that you used to see at your old school roaming the halls alongside you. Kids like Gates are a marker of how much gene-tweaking high-income homes like those in Beacon can afford. The ones you used to know who were mottled with vitiligo or dense freckles are reminders of an earlier stage in Battery City's history, and will remain as such for a long time - because the chromosomes they carry are both viable traits to be passed along and dominant on top of it, inflicted on them by parents who once needed carbons and credit to put food on the table.

By contrast, 06 is darker than his companion in both hair and complexion. Study his features. Think of them in the framework not of a fellow SCT, but of a kid your age named Dalton Reese. As far as you can tell his genetics are as natural as yours, which means he probably came from a household a little less well-off than Gates. Reese still has genetics on his side though; he's already started a growth spurt that puts him several inches over her. You're taller than both, though Reese has a breadth to him that you think means he'll end up with much wider shoulders, a much stouter frame than your slender one. Stronger and more powerful. Built for strength and not speed.

They both live in the Beacon District. They've had it better than you from the start. Maybe that's why it's so obvious that it rankles them that you, some nobody from Neon, can top the scoreboard and keep them both down for so long. They probably grew up on the city's Inner-Internet. Their families probably have holo-phones and battery-powered floating vehicles, while to you those things are distant realities at best because you're used to things like sharing a room and sharing a _life_ and having to save up for a new pair of shoes. The pair of them have had every opportunity that you haven't.

You've been silent too long as you drink both their faces in. Try to visualize them as Lydia Gates and Dalton Reese, and not SCT-28 and SCT-06. Try to picture them as people instead of the scarecrows they're turning into and find that you can't. It looses something inside you, like a nail becoming unburied from a point in your chest.

"Helloooo?" says Reese, waving a hand in front of your face. Gates snorts a little, casual and derisive. "You with us there, Neon?"

They don't like you. You don't think they even really respect you. Their specialized torment has graduated to _tolerance,_ though they still treat you differently from all the rest. Aside from your ░░░░er, it's the one time that anyone close to your age has ever really paid specific attention to you. It's not friendship, but you don't have a word for it either.

Weigh this for a moment before looking them in the eyes, one after another.

"Wanna break into the SCT kennels?"

Gates and Reese look at each other.

Then Gates' expression splits into a delighted grin.

Breaking into the kennels without Instructor knowledge or permission going to land you in trouble if you're found out, but you know everything about the SCT building by heart. You've traversed its hallways enough to know the location of every security camera, the code that needs to be punched into every number pad. The highest security doors are vacuum sealed and kept behind locks that require specialized keycards to access them, but you're not after something as ambitious as that. It's not difficult to get in. 

Your exposure to the kennels is limited to a generally brief stop before and after classes, so for the most part you don't see very much of them. The place smells like dog hair and disinfectant and the pre-moistened kibble that every SCT companion receives twice daily. The dogs themselves have been growing well and performing obediently; they're all well-behaved when the three of you creep through (because while Gates is best at it, all three of you have been trained on how to circumvent a lock and the possibility that some errant SCT might make use of this knowledge in the unintended sense seemingly hadn't occurred to your Instructor). While a few of the dogs lift their heads and snuffle hopefully at the unexpected intruders, none of them growl or make any undue noise.

Behind you, Reese and Gates keep pace and snicker over something or another. They don't seem terribly concerned with whatever it is you're doing. They're more keen on getting to _do_ it. You can only guess why they might be go along with this. Maybe it's a sense of not wanting to feel left out, or the innate rush of breaking a rule when so much of your daily performance rests on your ability to follow orders. Maybe it's not wanting to miss something that might give them an edge over you during drills.

This section of the kennel is devoted to your class. Count fourteen in their cages. You're not sure what happened to the two belonging to your recently culled classmates.

Rather, you _are_ sure, but you don't want to think about it.

It's easy to find Jackson's cage. She whines a little when you find her but you hush her quickly, scratching behind her ears through the bars.

"Did we really come all this way just so you could pet your freakin' dog?" complains Gates. "As if you don't do enough of that in classes."

Ignore her.

"Maybe Neon knows something _we_ don't know," says Reese. "I mean, there's gotta be a reason he's better at live fire courses than _you."_

"He is _not."_

(Gates is right. You're not.)

"You _suck_ at live fire courses, and everyone knows it."

"Take that back!"

Booted feet scuff over the cement floor as Gates takes a swipe at Reese. He skates back, grinning.

"I'm gonna beat your _ass,_ Reese," she growls at him. "Hold _still_ and take the hit like a _real_ scarecrow or I'll raise the alarm."

Ignore them.

"As _if._ You'll get us all penalized for that, and I don't think you'd be willing to jeopardize your _score_ like that."

"Oh, you think you know what I'd do for my _score?_ It'd take Neon down a few rankings, how about that?"

"Would it?"

Feel them both looking at you. At present, the strength of their combined gazes isn't enough to leverage you from your focus on Jackson, who's staring at you with big dark eyes while she pants and wags her tail as though you're not the thing that will be instructed to end her life. She doesn't know that. She trusts you because you're the one that raised her. You were given express instructions not to fall prey to affection for your charge, but that was always going to fail. Accept that the SCT program _expected_ it to fail as one final marker, one final assessment of one's emotional capacity to fight in a war in a position of authority.

There's no war anymore, but the program still acts as though there is. Like it expects that peace not to hold.

"What are you even doing, Neon?" asks Gates, sounding annoyed. "Seriously, why are we still _here?_ That why we did this? 'Cause you missed your _dog?"_

It's difficult to verbalize why it matters to you to have seen the pair of them like this, unfiltered through the SCT Program's lens. It feels important in a way you can't articulate that you see them like this while you still can. Not as weapons or as instruments or as numerical designations or as killers, but as your classmates. Kids like you. Not friends exactly, but the closest to friends that you think you're liable to have.

Take in their expressions: matching looks of annoyance and disdain. It's the most human either of them have ever looked. Wonder if you've ever looked that way to them.

"Hello?" says Reese, dragging the word out several syllables past its termination when you continue to sit and look at them and don't answer. _"Neon._ Let's _go._ I'm _bored."_

"Then go," you tell them both. They exchange a look. Gates raises her eyebrows. Then, with a snort, she turns on her heel departs. Reese soon follows. 

Jackson whines at you. Rub gently at the soft fur behind her ears. Wait for the sound of footsteps to fade out.

It's not quite complete silence that follows in their wake. The ambient sound of panting and shifting paws is close enough.

For a moment, allow yourself to fall apart in the quiet of the SCT kennels. It's not peaceful but it's isolated and there's no one around but the dogs and dogs won't report you to anyone for indulging in any untoward displays of emotion. Jackson won't fault you if, for a second, you have to shut your eyes and breathe out through your nose and press your face to hers. Allow, for a second, for half a minute, for the span of several deep breaths, the inflorescence of something dark and fearful as it unfurls in your stomach and rots you from the inside out. Let the electric weight of it crush your lungs. Let the cold, distant blot of panic spider out into your guts and through your veins until it's clenched behind your teeth, your molars gritted so hard that the pressure throbs your temples. Take brief refuge in the promise of absolute darkness, the illusion of an emptiness around you, in the temporary relief of not having to inhabit the world for a minute.

You hold yourself like that until the turbulent swell that's been threatening to tear you apart from the inside subsides into something bearable. It still aches, but it doesn't consume you.

Stroke Jackson's head gently, keep your forehead pressed to hers until she pulls back to swipe her tongue along the line of your cheek, consolingly.

"I'm sorry," you whisper to her, though you're not sure what you're apologizing for yet. For what you're going to do, maybe. For what's inevitably going to happen to her.

Remember to lock up and cover your tracks when you finally set out for home.

**\--**

**i carried in my snake mouth a boxful  
of carnal autobiographies.**

**\--**

The problem, when you get home, is not that your ░░░░░er is still gone. Rather, it's in how your ░░░░er is there but your mama isn't.

You can tell the second you look at her. Her smile is all molded plastic and too bright and too perfect. She smells the way everything in the SCT building smells: like relay gel and antiseptic. She speaks with a lifting pitch and a too-careful intonation that sounds the way grains of dust rubbed underneath your skin feels. You catch your ░░░░░er's eye, briefly, and ░░e looks away almost at once. Read without difficulty the guilt in the sideways tilt of h░░ head, in the angle of h░░ chin. Know that ░e blames h░░self for it.

Because your mama was responsible for raising you, and while you're the perfect student, the ideal SCT, at the peak of the leaderboard in your classes, your ░░░░er is a problem student and a problem _citizen_ who's constantly in and out of re-education and needing extra OAs and adjustments to h░░ prescription, and after a while you know that the upper management starts to regard the child as less of a problem and more of a symptom of a wider, broader problem. So they treat the problem at the source.

Your mama was considered the problem. And they replaced her. 

It's a standard procedure, in the more extreme cases of disruption and disobedience. You just...hadn't realized that you were living _in_ one of those extreme cases.

(What else have you missed?)

Your mama is gone.

Let it sink in.

Your mama is gone.

It's a standard procedure. It's happened to other kids before. It's an open secret, at least in the Neon District, that some people's parents are simple automatons. It's always done quietly, quickly, without fanfare, but people notice. It's hard not to. Their replacements are too exact, and their schedules too precise. And once it happens, there's no knowing where they...end up.

Your mama is gone.

Repeat it to yourself silently, several times over. Look at the empty-eyed automaton that's replaced her and try to muster the same sputtering flickers of affection that you could feel, on the very best days, for the woman who raised and fed and cared for you. Maybe, in time, you could adjust to it. Maybe, in time, you could come to see a service unit as an acceptable replacement.

It wouldn't matter once you turn fourteen. You'll go in for your SCT finals, and that'll be the end of it.

Won't it?

Your ░░░░er doesn't say a thing to you. ░░e stomps to your shared room and when you look inside, ░e's huddled under the covers, shaking. Making quiet, angry noises that you know you're not supposed to hear.

Struggle to categorize the void that gapes in your soul. Fail.

Stop thinking about it.

Stop _thinking_ about it.

Thinking about it gives it power and it feeds that awful nothingness that's begun to eat away at you. Those precious moments you spent in the kennels unravel, undone in an instant. Taste panic in your throat, adrenaline in your blood. It's clinging and chemical and you _inhale._ If you let it fester it will start to claw at you so don't give it the option. Don't let it breed unrest in your soul.

Don't think about it.

Go to your room.

**\--**

**i went in search of a face without theory.  
The window went on to sing a throb of deer  
melody.**

**\--**

You're slipping.

Everyone can see you slipping and it doesn't happen all at once but that doesn't seem to matter. You've never been great at long-range live fire courses but you're making stupid mistakes before you can catch them. You're spun out, letting too many memories split you into fourths. You can feel yourself cracking along the fault lines of the mosaic identity you've created, the parts of you that only exist when you're attending your SCT courses and the parts of you that only exist at home and the parts of you that can no longer exist at home because your mama isn't your mama any longer. You built your foundation on separations that are now tearing you apart.

Your classmates and fellow SCTs are starting to notice. Instructor Weaver is starting to notice. The scarecrows that intermittently assist with instruction notice, and they're the hardest to fool.

_"Pick up the pace, 27."_

_"You're slowing down your team, 27."_

_"That was a sloppy victory, 27."_

Remind yourself to focus. Remind yourself that your mama was not your entire life and she was _never_ your entire life and everything shouldn't be grinding to a halt just because she isn't here anymore. You're still an SCT. You're still training to become a more refined weapon than anything BL/ind has at its disposal. Reese and Gates are inching closer and closer to your lead spot, and you can only barely keep ahead of them.

"27!" snaps Weaver. Stiffen your shoulders, straighten your back, raise your chin, stand at attention and do not let on through even the slightest flicker or deviation from the norm that the shout has startled you. "You were asked a question. Scarecrow Korse requires an answer."

It's Korse today. He's one of the more frequent scarecrows to assist in training. Though those days are still generally rare, he's frequent enough for you to recognize him on sight. Aside from Fume, he's the one that shows up the most. It's not your place to ask if scarecrows like him genuinely don't have anything better to do. They're graduated professionals with the highest kill percentages in recorded history, and it feels like they should have more pressing assignments than this.

Apologize for the inconvenience to Korse's valuable time by forcing him to repeat the question for your benefit, because you hadn't been paying attention like you should have. Silently bite the inside of your cheek until your mouth floods copper and acid when the hesitation docks your score. Ignore Reese's triumphant smirk and Gates's pointed snicker.

Quarter-hour break near the end of the day, then cooldowns just before classes get out. The burn of your humiliation hasn't entirely faded from the heat in your cheeks and your veins but it's easy enough for most to mistake the flush for exhaustion and not lingering dismay. Which, _blunted_ as the sensation is, as every sensation is (because it's best for those kinds of things to be left at the door when you're destined to make killing your business), it still stings in a very particular way. It's like a rib being prized out of your chest. You can imagine the sensation perfectly: the crack and _pop_ of the bone being split from the trunk of your spine.

Tell yourself that it would be orders of magnitude more painful than the shame pervading your nervous system. There's a part of you, a significant part, that doesn't quite believe this.

"SCT-27." 

Don't make the same mistake again. Look up and stand at attention when addressed. Classes are technically out now but you're still on the SCT building premises and even if you weren't, it's never a good idea to outright ignore someone higher in rank than you.

Scarecrow Korse looks you over with a clinical methodology as he approaches. His dark eyes flick coolly up and then down, taking you in. You're getting taller by the day, though despite your training you are still in essence little more than a wiry thirteen-year-old (a wiry thirteen-year-old who knows how to throw a punch and break a grown man's neck and how to fire a weapon in the field and a hundred other things that you've memorized so thoroughly over the past three years and change that they feel engraved into you, carved into the very marrow of your bones).

He towers over you. Wonder what he's seeing as he evaluates you. Wonder how much of him might have changed since you saw him last - how many of his moving parts been replaced with prostheses to accommodate injury in the field or simply to further the program's idea of self-improvement. Scarecrows will frequently petition for the most cutting-edge augmentations and biomechanical replacements that Better Living has to offer. Earlier this week, Scarecrow Fume had demonstrated the swing and arc of an upward kick and the blow she'd struck into the wall had left a crater in its wake along with the dull ringing tone of metal on metal. Your takeaway from this is that at some point between then and when you saw her last, her right leg had become a prosthetic with enough power to punch a dent into a sheet of titanium alloy composite.

With difficulty, meet Korse's gaze. The lights reflect oddly off the dark pits of his eyes. He has eyes a little like yours, creased with epicanthal folds. The shape is all different though. His skin is pale beneath the fluorescents, but so is everybody's. Battery City weather control paints everyone in similar, varying shades, sparing them the ultraviolet cascade of the desert.

He looks the same to you as he did before, but so had Fume. They always look like people.

"Your performance has suffered," says Korse, because of course he's noticed. Everyone has.

There it is again. The burn in the back of your throat and at your ears. You'd known it was glaring but you haven't slipped yet. Your errors have, thus far, been recoverable. You're still at the top of the scoreboard. Nothing's dragged you down yet.

"Distractions can't be afforded in war," says Korse. 

"I thought the Wars were over," you offer tentatively, before remembering to add, "sir."

"They'll never be over." Korse's teeth glint white beneath the fluorescents. They practically glow. "Not as long as Zone-rats still breathe."

You've never seen a Zone-rat or a killjoy or anyone who goes by any of the other names for the people who live outside the city walls. You only know what you've been told about them. They're the enemy. They live in heat and fire and sun and sand. They want to tear the city apart and bring Better Living to its knees. They want to take Battery City, the one oasis of hope and innovation in the irradiated California desert, and raze it and celebrate in the ruin left behind. The Analog Wars were all about the city's efforts to ensure this would never happen. The SCT Program is all about the city's efforts to ensure it still won't.

As long as there are killjoys out there, the fight isn't over.

"You're at the top of that board for a reason." Korse jerks his chin in the leaderboard's direction, where your designation is illuminated in the neutral blue glare of the digital scores. SCT-28 has been hovering a few decimal points behind you for days now, and SCT-06 isn't far behind. "Same as I was."

He's one of the highest-ranking scarecrows active today. It's no surprise that he was at the top of his class as well. Like you are now.

"You're better than the rest of these trainees," he continues. The words are cold and in them is a threat not to grow complacent and not to slip up the way you have been for weeks now. He hasn't moved any closer to you but it nonetheless feels as though he's looming, as though the density and mass of his presence has somehow increased and caught you in its gravity well.

Your throat works in a compulsive swallow. Nod.

"Yes, sir."

"You're like me." There's a fervency and intensity to the words that seems inappropriate, more dramatic than the situation really calls for, but you're rooted to the spot and you don't look away. You meet Korse's gaze unflinchingly as his eyes bore deeper into your. He grinds the words out in a cold, deliberate drawl. "I made it to the top and I _stayed there_ and you have it easier than I ever did. _Fight_ for your spot. We _need_ killers like you in the Zones." 

Think of Jackson, her earnest eyes and her ever-wagging tail. Think of your ░░░░er and the way ░░e has always been uncontained and uncontainable. Think of your mama, erased from your life like a redacted sentence on paper.

Korse calls you _killer_ like it's a given. He calls you _killer_ like it's fact even if he definitely knows that, like any SCT, you've yet to actually kill anyone. It means he can tell at a glance that you're good at it, and it seems likely to you that he, like so many others in your life, is correct about that. You're not a good person. Good people aren't...good at the things that you're good at.

You're not a good person, but you'll make a decent weapon. You have been sculpted and bred and designed for war, and the SCT program has not faltered or slowed in that agenda regardless of whether or not there is a war that needs fighting.

"Understand?" says Korse. The words are so quiet they're nearly inaudible but for a soft hiss. There's a fire behind them that feels incorrect for the mundanity of the conversation itself. He's a scarecrow, one of the highest ranking with the best kill count in years. He's set and broken new records, and here he is wasting his time with a trainee, acting like he can afford to have a piece of him burning through this conversation while he talks to you. Killers are supposed to blaze cold but looking at Korse now he seems anything but. He's far too incensed and you're not sure what it says about you that you've noticed this.

He's asked you a question, and he's waiting for your answer.

Look Korse dead in the eyes and respond.

"Yes, sir."

**\--**

**the shape, the day of my belly sobbed  
with the outline of a deer.**

**\--**

Don't let those words go to waste. Korse took you aside to speak to you _specifically_ about keeping ahead of the curve and while it doesn't quite feel real that he bothered with you to begin with.

Don't let it be for no reason. Redouble your efforts. Fight harder for all of a week before the grind of returning to a grim, silent apartment each day starts to wear at you. Try to shake it. Don't let it drag you back.

You're staying ahead. You're not letting 06 and 28 get to you. You're _not_ letting them get to you. You're not thinking of them or of your mama or of your ░░░░░er and you're definitely not thinking of Jackson. You're not thinking of how the other SCTs treat their SCT companions and privately trying to gauge whether or not they'll be capable of doing what will inevitably be ordered of them. You're not thinking of how you've grown accustomed to Jackson keeping up with you in training and the rhythm of her gait or the feel of her fur under your hand.

Like you, she's a tool. She's a weapon. She has a jaw capable of breaking bone and crushing arteries to jelly and forcing a target to submit out of sheer and enduring agony. Grow accustomed to directing her like the weapon she is during team-based exercises.

In your mind, design the thing that kills her. The laser blast or the snap of a bone or compression of a trachea. Force yourself to accept it: _she is already dead._

Don't think about the cold, clear sliver that leaves in your heart.

You're keeping ahead of the curve like Korse advised you. You're performing optimally. You're not letting it get to you, until of course you are and you make a bad call and knock out half your team during drills and have to sacrifice the other half just to claw your personal way to victory. You miss every target during long-range courses to the point where SCT-06 openly mocks you for it and you don't have any rebuttal for him because you deserve it. You tear a muscle during laps and have to go to medical and they tell you to stay off it but that's not going to be possible if you want to keep your position, so you push yourself even if the injury burns with every other step.

You're performing adequately. You're at the top of the leaderboard. You're in charge during team-based exercises. You're -

You're trying to blink away the starbursts of white light that have made it impossible to see.

It's a standard drill. Team on team, and you're lead and SCT-06 is the opposing lead. You were taking the first steps into enemy territory, moving out from behind cover to advance.

Then the world had gone sideways, and you'd lost track of where you were headed.

"27, _respond."_ Someone is speaking to you, loudly. The words cut through the continuous tone that's ringing in your ears, shrill and persistent. There are hands on the sides of your head. You blink hard, but it does nothing to clear the static hazing your vision. Everything's too bright. It's blindingly bone-white and nothing resolves into shapes you can recognize.

Try to remember how you got here. You stepped out of cover and something had bucked underneath your feet and flung you back with an explosive burst of light and a percussive _bang_. The back of your head throbs from the way it had cracked against the ground on impact, momentarily stunning you out of consciousness. You can't have been out for long. You can hear footsteps, murmurs, shifting weight.

You can't see.

You hit a stun mine. You must have. You made another stupid mistake. Hadn't been looking out. Stun mines on the course during team drills are a frequent occurrence and you hadn't been watching your step. You should have seen it coming. You should have been _watching._

"SCT-27, _respond, now."_ The demand grows more insistent. You're non-responsive. It's a point of concern. Non-responsive means potential TBI means critical medical condition. You don't know how critical your status is but you can still register the words and muster the wherewithal to respond so you do.

"Present." You force the word out from behind teeth that feel as though they're vibrating in their bone beds, still reverberating from the collision of your skull against the training room floor. 

"Good." It's Weaver, you realize. It's her grip keeping your head steady. She releases you and you can't tell where she's ended up - just that she's speaking and she's directing her instruction away from you. "Clear the floor. Let medical through."

_Medical._ How badly did you let yourself fray that you made this mistake? Weaver keeps speaking but she's moving further off and the high-pitched tone shrilling in your ears is impossible to think through.

What's the first step?

Categorize your injury. Flex your jaw and attempt to gauge the degree to which your temples throb angrily from the motion. Injury to the head probable. Injury to the eyes a near certainty. A BLi-issue exterminator-grade stunflash mine is built to operate as a non-lethal weapon. It generates a flash of light of over 8 Mcd and an explosive _bang_ greater than 150 decibels. While not designed to be lethal, it is intended to disorient and shock the victim. At close quarters, the effects of the bright light and percussive blast can be damaging in the short-term as well as the long-term.

The unnatural searing brightness is starting to fade out, but instead of assuming familiar shapes it only dims in hue until there's nothing but an uncomfortable blackness. Panic is automatic and instinctual. It claws its way up the back of your throat, hooks into the lining of your lungs, trails in ribbons of gasoline into the cracked webbing of your nervous system. Your breath quickens, your heart rate spiking. You're hyperventilating.

" - into shock?" Someone's in the middle of saying something. Someone else answers but the words are too distant. You can't feel the tips of your fingers even as they skate anxiously over the ground beneath you. Are you numb? _Nerve damage?_ You need to assess your injury but the order of your thoughts is getting too fast. Every instinct and mental command keeps catching on itself until they're all clotting into a formless tumor that's stopped everything else dead. Remember SCT-11, bleeding out on the training room floor. Rip yourself violently out of the though when the mere memory speeds your heart up further. _Stop thinking. Stop thinking._

Isn't this exactly the kind of thing your prescription is supposed to prevent? 

_Stay calm. Stay calm._

You're being moved from floor to gurney. Tense up automatically when medical personnel lay hands on you. You can tell it's medical personnel based on the clinical way they speak to one another, talking around and over you. None of them ask you direct questions. 

"No dilation," says one, which is how you realize that they're shining a penlight into your open eyes. You can't see it. You can't see _anything,_ not even shapes or shadows or blots of light. "Partial or complete blindness is looking probable."

Swallow your reflexive jolt of terror. You're past that. You're past that. You're supposed to be _past that._ The pills are working. They're working, aren't they? They're supposed to be _working._

You can't see.

Try to breathe in.

You can't see.

Try to breathe _in._

You _can't see._

Your head feels like it's muffled in cotton or some equally sound-dampening equivalent. You are hyper-aware of every line of muscle in your body, every clenched tendon and straining organ, while you breathe faster and faster and take in less and less air.

Someone fits something over your face - an oxygen mask that forces purified air into your lungs. Don't struggle. Let it happen. Let it happen. Words are flurrying overhead but they're moving too quickly for you to catch any of them and you're having trouble picking up much of anything through the lightless tunnel-rush of friction buzzing through your head, over your ears. 

A sting at the crook of your elbow is the only warning you get before your remaining senses fuzz and fade, your heart squirming feebly in an arduous clench before it slows.

You're already in blackness. When the silence eventually, mercifully follows, you sink into it gratefully.

**\--**

**the clouds were a mouth-shaped poison,  
& ready. **

**\--**

" - expected to make a full recovery."

"That's not good enough."

People are talking, though the words are indistinct. Try to open your eyes and find that you can't. There's something on the upper half of your face, wrapped around your eyes, that's making it impossible for you to open them.

Try to sit up. Your muscles are lax and unsteady, like you've been lying down for some time, but they respond well enough the longer you're awake and you manage to get partially upright before someone notices your efforts enough to stop you. There's a hand on your shoulder, keeping you firmly in place.

"Hey, hey. Slowly." The tone is an adult's, which means they probably outrank you. 

Obey on reflex and go still.

"That's it. Keep still so I can get this off. All right?"

It doesn't hurt exactly, but it feels like layers of dead skin being slowly peeled away as the wraps around your eyes are removed. The uniform blackness over your vision starts to lighten by increments. Your temples pulse with pain in protest. Try not to squint when the final layer drops away, veil-like, and the achingly white backdrop of the SCT Building's medical wing stabs at you with an unavoidable intensity.

The angles and corner of the building are too bright, too defined. Every detail feels outlined, distinct, crowding your gaze with more information than you can feasibly process.

"You're doing all right," the shape in front of you says. It organizes itself into something far too sharp. It feels like you're looking at the doctor through a pair of binoculars, every crease in his face and wrinkle on his coat thrown into excruciating relief beneath the overhead fluorescents. The light hurts your eyes. "You're recovering well, all things considered."

Reach up to feel at your face. The doctor gently catches your wrist before you can get that far.

"You're still _recovering,"_ he says firmly. "Don't push it."

Again, obey automatically and let your hand drop. The doctor leans back once you do so, apparently content that you won't try any further ill-advised motions.

The tag fastened to the label of his coat reads _Dr. Stewart._ The little black letters jump out at you crisply once you notice them, and you squint so everything blurs a little bit. It makes it more bearable to look at.

The questions sit on the edge of your tongue. _Why am I awake? Why am I still here?_ You screwed up. You screwed up and you made a really _stupid_ misstep but you think that, if you'd been bleached and washed out of the program, you wouldn't still have the memory of said screw-up firmly imprinted in the contours of your brain.

"Weaver said she wanted to talk to you once you're awake," says Dr. Stewart, evenly. "Can you manage a sitrep?"

Nod.

Dr. Stewart eyes you for a moment, like he's not quite sure he believes you. Nonetheless, he sighs and turns for the door.

"She'll be in here in a minute."

The door closes behind him. There is, briefly, silence.

Take the opportunity to study what, exactly, has changed about your vision. You couldn't see anything, and now you can see...what? Too much? The light is too bright and the angles of the room are too hard. Despite that, you can tell by the arrangement of the room alone that you're in a solitary ward in the SCT medical wing. You can tell that much, because all the wards in the SCT medical wing are solitary and also look exactly the same. The room is small, relatively bare. Starched white sheets, white covers, white pillows. The steady, repetitive beeping of a bio-monitor hooked up beside you, the wire threaded to the cap over your finger and feeding the machine your biometrics. The blinds are drawn, which does very little to dim the overwhelming brightness of the lights which are fluorescent and white and unrelenting.

Resist the urge to run fingers over the part of your face that was, until recently, bandaged. That would be a flagrant disobedience of orders and you don't want to inflict any permanent damage to the site of recovery. Still, the way everything is far clearer than it should be is hard to ignore.

There's a small washroom available to you in your room. Swing your legs out from under the covers and place your weight, gingerly, on the balls of your feet. The headache redoubles when you stand and the pressure around your temples changes, clenching all the harder around the nerves clustered behind your eyes and under your jaw. Grit your teeth. Feel every ounce of weight stuck to your bones. The blood throbs in your veins like it's gained viscosity while you were out of commission.

Walk, unsteadily but without support, for the mirror in the washroom. Brace your hands on either side of the small sink and take in the minutiae of your reflection.

The skin around your eyes is a little reddened and swollen in places, but other than that, you look...

Fine. 

With the way your head keeps aching it doesn't feel altogether real to look at yourself and see very little physical evidence of the injury that laid you out. Your guess: that the effects of the stun mine were mostly internal. Damage to the photoreceptors due to a unavoidable burst of bright light from the mine's discharge wouldn't be visible. That doesn't explain why your face was bandaged prior to your waking.

Strain to discern what about your face has changed, _why_ your eyes feel different when they look exactly the same as you've always been able to remember, but the effort starts to intensify your headache. Abandon it in favor of returning to your bed, leaning back, and shutting your eyes until that persistent, mind-numbing ache abates.

While the respite blunts the edge of the sharp pains jabbing in twin tracks through your eyes, it doesn't excise them. When the door opens again, sit up and focus anyway.

"SCT-27." Weaver enters the room, addressing you sharply. Straighten up in place to the best of your ability, ignoring the way the glare of the lights intensifies your headache.

Weaver surveys you in a curt up-and-down sweep, takes you in. She lingers on your eyes. Again, you have to wonder how they might look.

"We've been told you'll recover well enough," she says crisply. "Close proximity to a stun mine is capable of rendering victims permanently blind."

_But not you._ Fight down the urge to brush your fingers against your lids. Aside from the mounting pressure at your temples, it doesn't feel like anything up there is damaged any longer.

"You were not an exception to this."

The blood calcifies in your veins. The question presses up against your tongue and the backs of your teeth and you swallow it back. _Why, then?_ Why are you still here? You made a stupid mistake. You misstepped and these are the consequences for it. Your fingers dig into the loose fabric of the sheets in front of you, bunching them into anxious fistfuls. Don't look away. Continue meeting Weaver's eyes.

She sighs.

"I believe you're already aware of the program's tolerance for failure. It is nonexistent." Because just one screw-up was enough to cut SCT-11 from the program, and countless others. That mistake wasn't even on her conscience; it was SCT-28 subverting the restrictions of the team-based exercise, and 11 took the hit for it. Your mistake was monumentally worse and yet you're still here.

If Weaver reads your uncertainty in any part of your expression, she doesn't show it. She simply continues talking: "Regardless, certain interested parties were willing to vouch for your continued participation, provided you maintain an acceptable level of participation by the course's end."

Her eyes flick away from yours when she says _certain interested parties_ and you can't even begin to hazard a guess as to who she might mean by that. Someone higher up. Someone who outranks her. Someone with the administrative power and bureaucratic clout to keep you in the program in spite of your stupid, _stupid_ error. One of the scarecrows, maybe? Do any of them remember you? Even if they did, why would any of them care?

"You are one of our most successful candidates to date, SCT-27." Weaver's firm tone yanks you unremittingly back into reality. She commands your full attention when she leans forward, her hands clasped behind her back. "Your _failure_ should have ejected you from the program, but for reasons beyond my control, it did not. Your position within class rankings has faltered, and I will not be coddling you in any efforts to get it back. _Fight_ for your position, SCT-27. Prove your benefactors right."

She turns and makes for the exit. Over her shoulder, she issues one final ultimatum:

"I expect you to be back in class by the end of the week."

**\--**

**i saw violence in anything  
with a face.**

**\--**

You haven't just been knocked down from the top position in the leaderboard; you're fully _off_ it. Your ranking is now close to the bottom, a few further slip-ups away from being jettisoned from the program for good. Weaver was right. You're going to have to fight to get any of it back, and in record time if you want to make it before finals.

Trouble is, nothing in your life is making that easy.

You get headaches now - painful, dense knots that clench behind your eyes and drill into the core parts of your brain with a migraine-like intensity. Shutting your eyes dulls the edges of them but you can't go through your classes with your eyes shut no matter how much it might suit you. It makes it harder to focus on anything during class. Your long-range firing scores, already less than overwhelming, drop down to _abysmal._

SCT-06 and SCT-28 barely acknowledge you as they lobby furiously for the top position on the leaderboard. Their rivalry supersedes yours. Now that you're no longer a threat, you're no longer worth their malice, their cruelty, or their attention. It stings more than, perhaps, it should. Their tentative alliance with you had been one of convenience and you'd known that, but to have it openly proven to you that none of it meant _anything_ to them is like a needle pulling out.

Your ░░░░░er is even worse. ░░e doesn't listen to the parental nourishment unit that's been made to replace your mama and you suppose you can't blame h░░ for that. You obey the unit's recitation of city mandates out of simple instinct but you also know that a BL/ind-issued automaton means one more surveillance device in the home and you're not about to be an excuse for your life to be further investigated. They already took your mama. Your ░░░░er could easily be next. Especially if ░e doesn't stop making things more difficult than they have to be. You've always been the _good kid,_ the one who takes his pills and keeps to himself and follows the rules. Your newly minted parental unit is exact to the millisecond about bedtime ordinances and curfews and when your headphones should be tuned in to the right frequencies and when you should be paying attention to the television. Gone is the anxious pall that your mama always cast over the small apartment the three of you share. Gone is the smell of cold coffee in the mornings.

BL/ind has seeped into the parts of your home that were untouchable and ripped them away without any warning. Remind yourself that it was a necessity. Remind yourself that your ░░░er made this a necessity. Remind yourself - 

Remind yourself why you chose to fight, why it was so important that you be the best possible scarecrow you could be. On behalf of your mama and your ░░░░er - the two most important people in your life.

One of whom is no longer _in_ your life.

You can't be a good scarecrow and a good brother. You can't be. You can't be the soldier they need you to be if this is why you want to _be_ that soldier and maybe BL/ind knows that, because when they came for your mama they might have come for her for your ░░░░er's sake but they also might have come for her for _yours._ Because that's what being a scarecrow is. It's excising those attachments so they don't compromise you.

You'll be stronger for this. _You'll be stronger for this._

_You'll_ be, but your ░░░░░er...

░░e's taking it hard. In the weeks after your mama's replacement, your ░░░░er gets, incredibly, even more impossible to live with than before. ░e resists instructions, breaks h░░ headphones, throws away pills. ░e keeps you up late on nights when you can no longer afford to lose sleep, purposefully knocking open the window to your room and sticking h░░ head out it to watch the skies. The only reason ░░e hasn't been sent to a juvenile hall yet, you suspect, is because the parental service unit is supposed to be keeping h░░ in h░░ place.

Don't let it get to you. Ignore h░░.

Keep your head down. Listen to instruction. Do as you're told. Focus on trying to reclaim your position on the SCT leaderboard in classes. Do what's required of you, even as your ░░░░er threatens to upend your life _again_ by being the next thing to be removed from it.

If you were stronger -

No.

If you were _Better,_ it wouldn't bother you this much. You're supposed to be _Better._ Better at this, Better at not forming these kinds of attachments that can compromise everything in the field. But you're letting these things rule you, get the best of you. Your mama, your ░░░░░er, Jackson. Even SCT-28 and SCT-06, in their own way. Were you wrong to make _this_ your linchpin? To look at your life and decide that you would fight to protect it, and not fight merely because it was expected of you, _ordered_ of you? That's how you made it as far as you have. To the top of the leaderboard. The best in your class. The kind of SCT that someone would _vouch_ for to ensure you remained in the program even if anyone else would be cut loose.

The realization is a cold jolt to your nervous system: the nauseating clarity of understanding that it's not the Wars threatening to rip apart the only form of stability you've ever known. The Analog Wars have always been a vague threat you've been trained to face, but with the Wars over - they're not the threat to the people around you.

You're no longer so sure that you can say the same of the thing that decided you were best equipped to protect them.

**\--**

**i wished for a place big enough for grief,  
& all I got was more grief, plus People magazine.**

**\--**

On the training room floor, surrounded by the thirteen other remaining SCTs in your class, SCT-20 is dying.

It was his own fault. Like you, he screwed up. Unlike you, he didn't have much in the way of high rank to lose. He was two spaces below you and if he goes then you're going to be that much closer to the bottom. You've already decided that this is primarily why you're acting as you are and moving forward to help him, unprompted. Korse advised you to be ruthless and to be a killer and you're certain that this kind of snap decision to ensure your fellow SCT doesn't bleed out is the opposite of how Korse counseled you to act.

You missed the specifics of what led to this, as SCT-20 was on the opposing team for this particular exercise. All you know now is that the fighting has ground to a standstill on account of 20's skull being cracked open. A long, dark smear runs down one of the walls. You're closest to his position so you converge on his location, drop down to your knees to check his status.

Head injuries are notoriously difficult to treat. Check pulse, check breathing, check to ensure if he's conscious. He's not. Your hand goes to the back of his head, and things move when you touch it. Your palm comes away wet and dark.

20's eyes are wide and unfocused. Blood leaks out from his nose. It's staining his teeth. He's still breathing but the blood spreads an ever-widening pool on the white floor and you can't stop thinking about SCT-11 and the way you have no way of knowing where she is now or what happened to her. Where 11 had been screaming and panic, 20 is dead quiet. It's how you know that he's dying. He's still breathing, but it's slow and the longer you stare at the concave indentation that's been made of the top of his skull the more something dark and unsettled starts to unfurl inside of you. It's black, gelatinous, oily. It swims up your gullet and sticks your tongue to the roof of your mouth with the gluey, rancid clumping of bile. Your prescription is supposed to be a chemical shield but there's no swallowing down the dread breeding inside your chest cavity.

What do you know about treating a traumatic brain injury? You don't. You don't know anything about treating a TBI because your biological training covers only the most precise and efficient ways of killing someone, not ensuring they don't die from a hemorrhage. Your medical training covers the procedures that could be conceivably performed upon yourself, but once you've been affected by a potentially lethal head injury the most you can do is hope that either someone else calls in a real doctor for you or that you bleed out quickly.

What do you remember? Stabilize the subject. Prevent further injury to the head or neck and further bleeds. Control blood pressure. Ensure the brain is getting enough oxygen.

The back of SCT-20's head has been ventilated to the point where you don't think there's going to be an issue in his brain getting enough oxygen. He's dying and you know with perfect intimacy the mechanisms by which he will die and you know enough to understand that there's more you could be doing, but your hands have stilled and your muscles have locked into place. Stare at the caved-in break across 20's skull without seeing it.

"At _ease,_ SCT-27!" Weaver's tone has acquired that dangerous veneer that means you're on the verge of provoking her temper. She says it as though she's had to repeat herself several times now. Maybe she has.

Stand up slowly, stiffly. Personnel are already en route to 20's position, though you don't expect that he'll be lasting the trip back to medical. Stare at his glassy-eyed countenance as it's loaded onto the gurney by seemingly automated rote.

"Clear the floor," Weaver orders. "Back to your seats."

You turn to obey but Weaver stops you.

"Do not _test_ me, 27," she snaps. She looks at you, eye to eye, and her expression is cold. "The time when you were still engaged in this program upon your own merits has _passed."_

Wonder if she realizes how much of her lecture is making itself known to you and how much of it is being lost in the memory of SCT-20's eyes, open and staring, and the reminder of the exact pitch of SCT-11's screams.

Weaver grasps your chin between her thumb and forefinger and tugs you close, leaning down so that your face is inches from hers. It's the first time you can remember her ever touching you and you seize up.

"Your benefactors won't protect you. I _will_ drop you without a second thought if you do not _shape up."_

She releases you, straightens up. Breathes out. Her expression has once again achieved that unchanging mien of self-control she tends to exhibit. Catch scorn in the idle flick of her gaze as she turns away.

"Return to your seat."

She doesn't allow you to rinse off the blood this time.

It sticks to your fingers, dries in a stiffening coat that creases your uniform, and flakes off a powder of rust-red.

Go to bed that night with the smell of it still thick in your lungs.

**\--**

**there were some inside things i was going to make  
outside things, just for one person in a godless  
living room, full of passé plants.**

**\--**

You've sunk so low on the SCT rankings that it's seeming less and less likely that there's any hope for recovery. Your single, stupid error that ripped you from the peak to the very bottom was only the start and no one acknowledges it openly, but it's in every disdainful sidelong glance from your fellow SCTs, the whispers that occasionally follow you out of classes and into the Central Sector. To them, it must not seem terribly fair - that you could be saved the same fate of bleaching and washing out as every other failure, by simple virtue of your work performance up until this point. But you're not exactly proving your worth anymore, are you?

It doesn't help that your eyes still haven't adjusted. Subsequent check-ups with medical has them assuring you that this sort of acclimitization period is normal, that the headaches and eye strain will eventually pass and you'll be able to see better than ever. You're not clear on how long this is supposed to last, but it's affecting your miserable scores. You constantly misgauge distances, overestimate perspectives. Muscle memory and instinct, more than anything else, are what carry you through daily reps and CQC drills.

That sort of issue, after being _blinded_ in an injury that should have been permanent, is understandable. What _isn't_ understandable is this: how you wake up with a nauseating wrench in your chest, a hypnic jerk that spasms you from sleep, and realize that you can see all the dark corners of the room you're in even if all the lights are off per city mandate. Or it's this: how when you let your vision blur out and don't focus on anything, you can pick out the details on signs and buildings from a far, far greater distance than you should. You can read the price tags on BL/ind vending machines from one hundred meters away when before your injury you definitely couldn't. 

A capillary in your eye bursts during classes and it doesn't hurt but it does leak blood down the front of your face until Weaver stops mid-lecture and orders you to medical. You don't realize why she's commanded this of you until you feel the warm droplet slipping down your nose. Thumb at it, stare at the crimson smear it leaves behind

Medical tells you that this side effect is common and will probably lessen over time. You are not told what this is a side effect of.

Later, at home, take the extra time to run fingertips over your eyebrows, your lids, your temples. Grow frantic to unearth some kind of scar, some visual evidence of the injury you sustained. And - _there,_ almost invisible to the naked eye, barely perceptible to you but for the way you can now distinguish minute details when you couldn't before, you see them. They're nearly hidden in the natural pleat and fold of your lids, but you can pick out the thin seams of scar tissue running along the arch of your lid, parallel to the curve of your skull's frontal plate where the ridge of bone opens up to the socket.

Digest this.

Examine the way it sits in you. Study the way it contracts in your insides, leaves a slough of gasoline in your balled-up intestines. Memorize that momentary bolt of panic, chemical and instinctive, that hitches behind your ribs in a flare of short-lived adrenaline dread and the words it leaves behind:

_What else did they change?_

Trace every line and angle of your own body that you can reach. Search out evidence of scar tissue, of scalpel tracks, of any indication that some part of you might have been altered. Don't stop to wonder why it bothers you. Don't consider that, given the strictures of the program, it should not concern you if this procedure was done for your benefit, because your knowledge and consent has not been required for any aspect of your life in or outside of the SCT Program and never has been. By the time SCTs hit finals, everyone who passes will see their first round of bio-augmentations so they can be field-ready. Standard procedure. Was this just another step on that ladder, done prematurely for the sake of salvaging your position in the program?

_They did this to help you._ Without that medical intervention, you'd likely be blind or something very close to it. Washed out of the SCT Program, bleached, and returned to your unremarkable existence with a ░░░░er you're not certain you know anymore and a mama who is no longer yours.

How much of your body is still your own?

But - you've never been so naive to assume that your life was ever truly yours. So...

Don't let it slow you down.

Don't wash out. You _can't._ Not now, not after everything. They have to be keeping you around for a reason. They have to have chosen to allow you to remain in the program for a reason. Your failure was catastrophic and it shouldn't have been something you could recover from, though whether you're recovering from it or not is debatable. And if you wash out now, then Jackson...

You've formed this attachment that you were never supposed to form but that you think maybe they _expected_ you to form, because what else is war but the breaking of attachments and the severing of ties? But if you fail the program now there's no telling what will happen to Jackson. And if you stay, you _do_ know what will happen to her. What you will be made to do to her to ensure you pass your SCT classes and enter the next stage of the program.

Don't let it slow you down. Don't think about it. Focus on what's ahead. Continue driving yourself steadily uphill, intent on completing your SCT courses and then your finals for no other reason besides the fact that you don't know what else you're supposed to do at this point, because so many resources have been parsed out on your behalf that to give up now be to prove to your superiors that this judgment call was a mistake.

Accept that Jackson will be your collateral. Grapple with your new understanding of the word. Understand that, in war, collateral is inevitable. Isn't it?

Even though that war they've been preparing you for has never touched you, and now never will.

Come home late with nothing but sweat and bruises to ease your way into the room you share with your ░░░░░er. Every day, grow better at pretending that you haven't noticed how your ░░░░er has become something with clenched teeth and tension in h░░ shoulders and a rage that's building like a voltage differential behind h░░ eyes. Every day ░░e looks at you and you feel h░░ eyes on your neck and you can tell that ░e's looking for _something,_ staring at you for _some_ reason but you can't say for _what._

The pressure of the different versions of yourself are starting to seep into and over one another, and you can feel yourself beginning to fracture beneath the strain.

**\--**

**now what?  
so blah & bewildered, my hands  
have turned out to be no bee,  
all bumble, unable to tell the difference  
between the floor & the ground.**

**\--**

The primary difference between your mama and the parental unit that has replaced her (besides the smell, the sound, the words, the way everything about it is _off_ in such a fundamental sense that it's like they didn't even care to recreate her exactly) is that the unit does not require a job the way your mama did. It doesn't need to be awake in the mornings, though every day it is. Most of the time it simply stays in the room that used to belong to your mama, doing...you're not sure what. Charging, maybe. Parental units only hold a charge up until their child's sixteenth birthday, but you're not sure what's likely to happen once your ░░░░░er reaches that point. You'll still be living here...unless you aren't at that point, on account of taking your finals and possibly passing on from the SCT program, at which point you'll probably stop living at home.

That future is feeling increasingly impossible to achieve, but what's the alternative? Get bleached and scrubbed from the program?

Will you even remember what your mama is supposed to be like, after that? Will your memories of her fade and die, wiped clean with the rest of your memories of the SCT Program? Will you look at the automated parental service care unit inhabiting your home now and see nothing out of the ordinary?

You remember what your mama used to do, sort of. You never knew the specifics but it had to do with computers. She occasionally did some of her work at home, piecing together small, precise pieces for some nebulous end result you were never made aware of. Most of her work was done in one of the offices, but you've never seen it. She didn't often have occasion to bring it home. None of you ever brought your work home, save for your ░░░░░er, who brought _everything_ home regardless of whether or not it was wanted. 

One night, when sleep doesn't come easily to you (it comes less and less easily these days), you stop bothering with the anxious buzz running down your spine and throw off the sheets. The ground is cool beneath your bare feet as you pad through the apartment. The kitchen clock reads _2:31 AM_. The digital holo-glow throws a band of blueish light over the silhouette of the service unit that now serves as your parental figure, illuminating the curve of its cheek and the mechanical stillness to its shoulders.

Swerve away from the kitchen. Make, instead, for your mama's room. You haven't seen the inside of it in years, it feels like. You haven't had the occasion to. The room is smaller than the one you share with your ░░░░er but it feels bigger, perhaps because it's so empty. The lights are all out. It's completely dark, but that's not a problem for you these days. You can see just fine.

Walk quietly. Underfoot, the carpeting is thin, nearly threadbare in places. You're not sure if the parental care unit in the kitchen the next room over has audio sensors capable of picking up your footfalls, but you move with slow, careful precision regardless. Just in case.

There's nothing in the dresser next to the bed but folded-up items of clothing in varying shades of grays and blacks and off-whites. Work clothes. You remember your mama wearing these some mornings, rumpled and disheveled like she came home from work so exhausted that she simply never took them off before the following day. 

Extricate one of the shirts, bunch it beneath your nose, and breathe it in: dust and detergent and cheap coffee and all the scents you've come to associate with the woman who raised you. Clench the shirt in a wadded ball to your chest, seized for a heart-stopping instant with the desire to indulge in a childish impulse to cry.

Fight it down. Shove the shirt back into place, and continue rummaging through the rest. It's just clothing. Your mama is gone. You've accepted this. Don't allow yourself to dwell on it. Focus on the job you've outlined for yourself. Rifle through each drawer in turn with a methodical quiet. Don't indulge distractions.

The other drawers don't contain much of note. The top drawer, though...there's something pillowed among the tangle of unworn socks and neglected underthings. You almost miss it, but it clatters quietly against the plastic composite of the drawer backing when you rummage through the last of your mama's old clothes. Pick it from the bottom of the drawer, turn it over between your fingers. It's a dark rectangular prism - small, about the breadth and length of your thumb. _Thumbdrive,_ the part of you that's gotten good at memorization from SCT classes supplies helpfully. Meant for portable digital storage.

Your mama probably needed it for work, you rationalize. You're not sure what it contains, but to access anything inside it you'd need a computer and the only computers you know of are the ones in the SCT administrative offices. Those are off-limits to trainees even if, in theory, you could probably figure out how to get to one.

"What are you doing in here?"

Violence has been breeding in your blood since you turned ten and passed the SCE6. It runs like napalm in your veins, shoots the back of your spine with an adrenaline that rockets you to your feet, spinning around, snapping at attention - before you realize that the silhouette facing you belongs to the service unit that now wears your mama's face, and not your Instructor (the closest thing a trainee like you has to a CO). Every instinct to _react_ gathers up in an impossibly heavy knot beneath your sternum.

The thing that is not your mama is looking at you with a pathological blankness to its face.

"You should be in bed." The words are devoid of your mama's warmth. Those eyes meet yours and it occurs to you that, under ordinary circumstances, you shouldn't be able to see each other very clearly at all. You're both veiled in darkness because the lights in the room are off, but your mama is now a parental service care unit and low light levels don't have any impact on its ability to perform its job. You, on the other hand, have had your eyes messed with and come away with a sense of sight that's simultaneously too sensitive and too unfocused.

BL/ind has had its way with both of you then, hasn't it? It had its way with you, it had its way with your ░░░░░er, and when your mama stopped being what it needed her to be, it had its way with her too. You're two tools polished to an imperfect shine staring each other down and just thinking it strips the lining from your guts, hisses like a lit match in your chest, makes you want to ball your hands up over your mouth and scream.

"I couldn't sleep," you tell the parental service care unit, like it cares. Wonder if your reactions to it register as the insincere, rote things that they are, or if it's not been given the capacity to discern between that gradation of emotion.

"You should return to bed," the unit tells you. The words are inflected a little unevenly, but you can hear it trying to sound like a normal person. It still doesn't sound much like your mama. "It's never a good idea to resist Battery City bedtime ordinances."

Nod once. Muscle down the urge to back into the corner, _away_ from the human-shaped assemblage of machinery that's assumed the form of one of the only people in your life you've ever cared about. Every hair on the back of your neck prickles when you step around it to walk through the door. Feel its eyes on you. Don't turn around. Let the instinctive desire to react to the perceived threat, the one that's been hardwired into you through day after day of routine and training, run clean through your lungs with each exhale. Let it localize in your heart and clench a fist-shaped knot there.

The thumbdrive you took from your mama's dresser digs a sweat-warm line into the crease of your palm as you slip back into your room. The parental service unit stands in place, unmoving. Watching you.

Shut the door to your bedroom behind you. Sit cross-legged on your bed, trying and failing to soothe the thundering rhythm of your heart.

The fact that every part of you instinctively felt the need to categorize your new parental unit as a threat has not escaped you. Nor has the knowledge that, when it comes down to it, there's nothing you can do about that fact.

Tighten your grip around the thumbdrive. Hold it steady against your chest until your pulse slows, regularizes, and steadies.

You're being walked into corners. At home, in your classes. Your mama is a parental service unit that ensures you're following all Battery City mandates and your ░░░░er won't talk to you anymore and neither will any of the SCTs in your classes because you should have been cut from the program and you weren't.

Jackson is the one thing left to you that's still _yours_ and she won't be for much longer.

Grip the thumbdrive so tightly that it bleaches your knuckles bone white. 

You're holding the last thing in your life you can control, and it doesn't even really belong to you.

**\--**

**they feel dirt,  
but it feels like something they made.**

**\--**

It's easy to get into the SCT building after hours. You know all the security feed blind spots, you know the times all the guard details swap, and while you're not as good at cracking locks as SCT-28 you can manage it after your third try. You're not sure if other SCTs make a habit of doing this kind of thing, but 28 and 06 haven't been paying you much attention since they surpassed you on the leaderboard. That probably means they're not going to be interested in any further excursions like this one.

That's fine. You'd rather get this done alone anyway. You could have tried breaking in just after classes, but the only reason you got away with that kind of brazen intrusion before was because you had a pair of other trainees at your back, each of you very much aware of the status of the other two as insurance should anyone attempt to catch you.

Instead you're doing this in the dead of night. You're breaking several different city-wide ordinances just by being here: circumventing curfew, entering a restricted area after-hours, to name but a few. But it's not likely anyone will see you. Like you said, you know the way the SCT building's schedule runs, and you're hardly very obtrusive. You're small, slight, and light on your feet. You don't even need a light to get around, which drastically drops the likelihood of you giving away your position.

This time, instead of heading for the kennels, you make for the administrative offices. The blue glow from the terminal monitors is the only light in the room. Everything else is dark, but that's not a problem for you.

The single monitor in the administrative office is password-locked. It's not hard to figure out how to crack the security in place. They've taught you how to navigate BLi systems. It's part of your SCT curriculum, like just about everything else you know (how to asphyxiate someone slowly, how to take apart a gas-powered motor vehicle, how to field strip an EX-22BR), so it's easy.

That's what rankles, however vaguely. The fact that it's _so easy,_ that security is so negligible to someone like you who's spent nearly four years on-site seven days a week. Because it's unfathomable to anyone here that you would disobey.

So now here you are. Proving them wrong.

Everything stamped with a Better Living Industries logo is careful, precise, and organized to a fault. It's easy to pinpoint where every item has been requisitioned, the expected use for every resource. It's easy to figure out where everything goes. Your thumbdrive fits into one of the slots on the administrative work consoles, and you can put together from there how to go about opening it. It's easy. It's mechanical and automatic and you know this from classes but most of it is simple intuition.

You weren't sure what to expect it to contain, but what you find manages to surprise you.

Most of it is images. For a long while, you're not sure of what it is you're looking at. Clustered snapshots of security feeds overlooking the white-jacketed exterminators, armed with rifles and laserproof vests. Their apparel, more than the digital dates in the corner, gives away how old this footage must be. Much of it must have been from before you were born.

Click through each one with a mounting sense of _something_ building gaseous and elusive in your throat. You can't pick up on what it is you're feeling other than vaguely ill. It feels like the world is trembling a little beneath you, like the chair you're in is shuddering violently and might dislodge you at any second. Things slipping away and then back again, reality reaching outward to slap you across the face and then recede just as fast.

More images. An exterminator at the very edge of Battery City, judging by the white plane of the wall behind him. And it is a him, you think. He's tall, his hair dark and cropped regulation-short. He's pulled off the white mask that all exterminators wear, the one meant to obscure his face, but his head is turned away from the camera so all you can see is a sliver of who lies underneath. But - 

There's something familiar in the blurry slope of his cheekbone.

Click through, faster. All the images are in the same grainy, colorless hue that every BL/ind security feed and most official images assume. It's because of this that it takes you a moment to realize with a jolt that you're staring at the desert - or rather, at an image of the Combat Zones that fan out around Battery City. The exterminator has his mask off again, his weapon loose in his hands (EX-17BR, an older model of mid-range assault rifle that was quickly swapped out for something more versatile the moment it could be improved) as he looks over his shoulder to whoever's preserving his image in the moment. There's a query in his eyes and he looks mid-word. The world around him is little more than a blurred smear of smooth, mounded sand. There's a dark blot of smoke in the distance and the sky is pale but other than that there's not much you can gather from this singular image of the Combat Zones outside Battery City.

Other the fact that it exists. It's an exterminator out in the desert, and it's the first tangible proof of the Wars you've ever seen. It has not escaped your notice that, in spite of all your preparation, you've yet to actually experience any war firsthand. You've been taught the horrors of it, you've been trained to withstand it, you've been designed to excel at it, but you have never once in your short life _been_ in war.

This person has.

The last image in the thumbdrive looks it came directly from some kind of file. In the corner, a front-facing shot of the exterminator's face. It's the clearest his features look, save for the black stamping of "KIA" slashed diagonally across most of his face. Just beside it: his name, his age, his height and weight, all the information you'd expect BL/ind to have.

Read his name. Reread it. Shut your eyes, count backward from ten until the inevitable headache that's been crawling across your brain dissipates marginally, then open them again. Read his name one last time.

You don't recognize it, but you should. You'd known that his face felt familiar to you. Not because you'd seen it before, but because you'd recognized it in yourself and in your ░░░░░er - in the high tilt of the cheekbones, the angle of the zygomatic arches, the way he stands.

But even if none of that had jumped out at you, there's no mistaking the last name printed neatly beside his image, or the reason why your mama kept this thumbdrive secreted among her personal belongings for years and never breathed a word to any of you about it.

Run your fingertip over the white blot of the face in the pictures, that small scatter of pixels that are all that define the man that you think must have been your father.

_KIA,_ the image on his file says. _13-JUN-2001._

Meaning he was dead before you were a full year old. Wasted in the midst of a conflict you have been training and preparing to enter for several years now, only to have it end before you ever saw live combat.

Map out the borders of the jag in your guts. Try to process the lurch in your chest for the subdued grief that it is. You never knew this person but the thought that he was stolen from you by something out of your control constricts a band of iron around your heart. The Wars' end, also, was out of your control and in doing so it snatched away the one connection you and him shared.

Unless -

Refocus. He was an exterminator. Double-check this. There isn't much in the way of official documentation of him as a person aside from the paperwork on his KIA. Presumably this was turned over to your mama for her keeping after his death. Why else would she have a drive full of his memories? There's no telling how he ended up an exterminator on the Analog frontlines. The drive doesn't contain his reasons, his thoughts, his words. Only images and documentation, still frames of a life that didn't include or involve you in any conceivable way. Whether he was conscripted or enlisted willingly, he was an exterminator - not a scarecrow. That much is clear. He was never enrolled in the SCT Program. He never had to claw his way up the leaderboard the way you did. Meaning that, while you might have more in common with this stranger than you might have otherwise assumed, you're still the only member of your family to have been assessed with those benchmarks and allowed to pass into the SCT Program. It was outlined for you in clear delineations, sharp lines detailing a ladder that you had to climb if you wanted to last in the program. And you have, even when it wasn't deserved.

The man who fathered you had no such privilege. Didn't he? What drew the line between you and him - between you and your mama, your ░░░░░er, everyone you've ever cared about?

Hesitate.

The means to find out is readily available to you. You're in the administrative offices. You have access to the SCT building's computers which contain, among other things, personalized records on all trainees. Your records are digitized, like just about everything in the city. Easy to access. Easy to find.

You're not a good person. You know this. You've always _known_ this. This was obvious since you were ten years old, when Better Living Industries looked at you and knew without question that you were an ideal candidate to be trained into a lethal weapon. For three and a half years they have designed you to be their perfect soldier. They have designed you to sleep light, to fight pitilessly, to feel an itch in your bones when you sit still for too long. They have designed you to run fast and to wake restless.

All you want to know is _why._ Why you and not your mama or the man who you think _must_ have been your father. More to the point, why _you_ and not your ░░░░er. What separated the pair of you, what singled you out, what made you so _different_ from h░░? Because it has to have been something. If it was just how you tested, then what makes you a better student than h░░? What makes you a good SCT, and your ░░░░░er a frustration that needs to be routinely sent away and re-educated and wiped and retooled and medicated?

The SCT program keeps files on you, all of you. You locate your own easily. It's labeled with your name and everything.

Your full designation is SCT-40127. Class Four, first conscription, twenty-seventh recruit. You have the highest CQC marks in recent history, though you rank lower than almost everyone on the class leaderboard with long range shooting, especially as of the most recent scores. You already knew this. You scroll back to the beginning, at the point in your file where you were selected for the program.

More things you already knew. Name. Date of birth. Past medical history (none significant). Prior instances of re-educational overnight stays (none). Family history, social history, output assessment history, review of systems, physical exam, DNA sequencing - long chains of _A, G, T,_ and _C_ in different positions that make your too-sensitive eyes blur if you stare at them too long. And then, near the end of the initial records that define you, a short document labeled _STATUS REPORT_ dated to just before you turned ten years old:

> _Subject exhibits high rates of enzyme efficiency and high instances of protease development based on qPCR expression measurements, whole exon sequencing, and cytometric analysis performed annually per city ordinance S.32-5011C. Comparisons to sequencing of other family members on file indicate suboptimal results (see attached). Subject is ideal candidate for SCT program pending SCE6 test scores._

Your SCE6 scores might have brought you into the program properly, but it - it wasn't just that. Scroll through the associated documentation. Look, for the first time, at how you were scored and what each of the qualifiers were. You remember the physical fitness portions - those had been obvious gauges of reflexes, endurance, dexterity, stamina. But the others...obedience, adaptability, memorization...those had been less apparent.

Your SCE6 scores were high. You ranked especially high in adaptability and obedience.

Because that had been a factor. How well you can follow orders.

But it wasn't _solely_ about that. It was also about - you. Your DNA. The way that your body is _structured._

Neither your ░░░░er nor your mama were as fortunate as you to have that specific kind of genetic makeup. Maybe your father is at fault there, but you wouldn't know. All you have of him are images of someone you've never met, who was dead before you could even have a vague memory attached to the concept of him. He fought in the Wars, though. He could very well be the reason that you're so very _good_ at what you've been taught to do.

Your fingers tremble subtly by the time you reach the final few entries in your file. Almost skip over the section devoted to denoting each of your trips to medical, then stop. Some of these you remember, like the time you tore a muscle by pushing yourself too hard or the time you got a chunk of shrapnel flung at your face from a low-power explosive, leaving a starburst blot of scar tissue on your collarbone, but there's one you definitely weren't conscious for. One of your more recent visits to the SCT building's medical wing happens to be the only one marked as a long-term stay.

> _INCIDENT: Close proximity to stun mine during team-building exercise rendered subject blind and subsequently cut from SCT Program. Subject participation reinstated per appeal and recommendation from Scarecrow Korse and Instructor's approval of premature electromagnetic nanoantenna retinal implantation. Doctors C. Stewart and R. Rivera noted rapid recovery time well within predicted parameters. Required overnight stay for inpatient procedure. Subject departed from medical care twelve hours post-op, forty-six hours after initial admission._

You don't remember staying in medical for two days. Once you woke, you were discharged not long after normal class hours had elapsed. You must have been unconscious for most of it.

Keep reading. The final reports are the most recent.

> _PENDING FINAL SCORES: Recommend Class Four med-aug treatment: muscular cellular protein compound implantation, silicon carbide nanocomposite ossification, nanomachine self-repair and immunity implantation (see attached), biometric viscoelastic silicon substrate/platinum-iridium neural implantation (see attached), sub-dermal microchip implantation per SCT4.1 guidelines. Retinal procedure unneeded at this time due to prior alteration (see prior incident report)._

You've known, of course, that scarecrows receive medical augmentations. You've known that for some time now. You know, also, that those augmentations are typically implemented while one is still on the cusp of puberty. Once SCTs finish their finals, they go in for surgical augmentation at around age fourteen. That's how the program works.

Not for you. You got one of those augmentations early and it explains entirely too much. Your vision, the way things are too bright and too immediate but how you can see farther, pick up more details than you should, and how you can see as clearly in the dark as you can in the day. The way sometimes your eyes bleed because a capillary ruptures and it doesn't always hurt but that's probably because your eyes now ache regularly to the point where you can no longer discern when that pain is out of the ordinary. Reread the entry: _electromagnetic nanoantenna retinal implantation._ You might not be certain of the specifics, but you can guess what that means. How it's changed you. How it might continue to change you.

You should have been scrubbed from the SCT Program. You weren't. 

Why? Because _Korse_ vouched for you? Again - _why?_ Was he that impressed with you? Remember the exact color of his eyes and the stilted precision of his speech. Remember the way he'd watched you the first time you'd met him. You hadn't been at the scoreboard's peak yet. You'd barely been anyone of note. Once you began climbing rank in earnest, it was only once you'd faltered that he'd taken you aside and burned his motivation into your blood. Remember how he'd spoken it, like it was dire and inescapable. How _significant_ was that conversation, in Korse's eyes? Had it contained some secondary meaning, some additional undertone that had escaped you?

You think it must have. You think Korse must have seen something in you just as Fume did. _Promise_ she called it. Because the chances of you remaining in the program, if Korse hadn't intervened on your behalf, are slim to none.

Are they regretting that now?

You're not moving quickly enough. You're distracted, easily unbalanced. You're unmatched in hand-to-hand but in all other respects you're slipping, falling behind. Nothing you've done has proven that you deserve to have retained your spot in the SCT Program when by all rights you should have been shorn from it as soon as you made your participation in it a spectacular failure.

You can't change that. You can't _fix_ that. You're fast approaching finals with each passing day. Maintaining your pace means reaching the end of your courses means executing Jackson means multiple bio-augmentations and long months of recovery and physical therapy sessions to stay functional means reaching the desert means living out in the Combat Zones that killed your father means a million different kinds of possible deaths.

Feel yourself beginning to unravel. Pull back. Study that chain of events and examine which of them disturb you. 

The desert?

No; it's not the Combat Zones that give you pause. There's a tug in the center of your chest when you consider them, something like longing. Because, as alone as you are in the city now, that's the one thing you have left save for your ░░░░er: the knowledge that the desert was where your father went to die. It's the one singular connection you have to him.

It's not the desert that spikes premature panic in the ropy tissue of your heart, and it's not the threat of death. Death hasn't scared you before and it doesn't scare you now. Rather, it's the hurdle you can feel yourself inevitably racing toward. 

Jackson.

You've already lost one of the few people in the city that mattered, truly _mattered_ to you, and it cost you your sight, your social standing, and your position in the SCT Program. It cost you everything and it would have cost you more if Korse hadn't interceded.

How much more are you _willing_ to lose?

Do you have a _choice_ in that? If you fail, if you wash out, Jackson will still pay for your inadequacy and you'll gain nothing but a memory-bleaching and a re-education and you'll end up as someone you won't recognize.

There is, as far as you can tell, _one_ choice you can still make that allots you some measure of control over what will next happen to you and the people you have left. Your life might not belong to you and it probably never will but you're already falling hard off the slope the SCT Program has set up for you. If you're going to fail, it would be nice to fail on your own terms - by claiming control over the one thing you have in your grasp, rather than the simple crime of not being good enough.

So you load the entirety of your digital file onto your mama's portable thumbdrive so that your memories sit beside those of your father. Eject it and secrete it in the bottom of your shoe (because your SCT uniform doesn't have pants pockets). Then hesitate.

Stop hesitating.

Force yourself to follow through on the first truly irreversible decision you will ever make, and wipe your records from the BLi computers. Strip all of it bare, scour every mention of you that you can find from the digital guts laid open to you. Erase yourself. Redact yourself. Again and again and again, every time you find evidence of your existence on BL/ind servers, scrub yourself out.

They want to erase you so badly? You'll erase yourself _first._

When there's nothing left but the physical files in your hands and the drive in your shoe, shut everything down and leave. You've already eviscerated everything you are, everything you've been for the past three years, so you might as well do the one thing you still can.

The kennels are easy to find. Enter as quietly as possible - if one dog starts making noise, they _all_ wake up - and count through the cages until you reach Jackson's. Kneel down in front of hers, thread your fingertips through the bars, and begin picking the lock.

Jackson blinks awake not long into this endeavor. She _whuffs_ softly, pressing her nose to your hand inquisitively. Make it clear to her that she is to remain _quiet_ while you wrestle with the cage that not so very long ago you'd come to see with Reese and Gates at your back, in those fleeting moments when you could almost consider them friends. 

When they you could think of them as Reese and Gates, and not SCT-06 and SCT-28.

Your heart thumps faster when you unlock Jackson's cage with shaking fingers. You do this, and there won't be any question what happened here. What you've done. But you've already started burning that bridge, so to speak, and you can't stop now.

Jackson's tail wags fiercely when you work the door open. She can tell that she's going to be taking a trip that she hadn't expected, and the activity has her excited. It ignites a rawness in the core of you, a dim heart-pulse of an ache that makes it hard to swallow.

Time it right. Wait for the security cams to do their rounds before making your move, bolting out of the SCT building and then out into the city proper. Jackson keeps easy pace beside you, loping along eagerly as you lead her around street corners. She's never seen the city before, but you trained her well. Her nose twitches and you can read her excitement and desire to explore every new stimulus in the restive shifting of her paws, the happy lolling of her tongue. She stays beside you. You don't need a leash - just a quiet command that she obeys. Like you, she's been trained to obey.

Keep moving. Keep running until you reach the edge of the city's slums, the Ritalin District. It's not perfect, but it's the only place you can think of that a dog could survive without an owner.

Carefully unlatch the collar from around Jackson's neck. Rub at the thick ruff of fur there. She whines a little, keen to explore the world you've exposed to her.

"All right," you whisper. Press your face, briefly, into her quivering flank and breathe in, memorizing the scent of dog hair and disinfectant. Rub at the soft fur behind her ears one last time. "Go."

She obeys your command at once. She's off like a maglev on its rail, rocketing into the dimness with a delighted bark. Wince at the noise, then turn. Don't wait. Turn and start running. Turn and _bolt_ for home, as fast and as quiet as it's possible for you to move, before Jackson can look back and realize that you're not coming back for her. Run until the hard outline of your thumbdrive digs a vicious imprint into your heel.

Make it back home, climb in through the window, breathe through the curtain of darkness that shrouds you as you scramble back into the room you share with your ░░░░er. You made it. You went and got what you meant to, and you made it. 

You don't have to be a scarecrow. 

_You don't have to be a scarecrow._

Maybe tomorrow they'll figure out what happened and find you, hunt you down, bleach you for everything that you know and the knowledge you walked away carrying inside of you. It's practically a given, but that doesn't matter.

Relief flowers into your chest slowly, agonizingly, seeping bright claws into the crevices of your ribs. 

It lasts for all of a second before the panic sets in.

It ignites your nerves in twisting threads and then the tightness in your chest. Breathe, _breathe._ It's getting harder to remind yourself of the rhythm of your lungs when your heart threatens to rouse your ░░░░er with how loudly it's knifing at your ribs. _Breathe. Breathe._ Flip over. Try to burrow beneath the sheets of your bed. Yank on your BLi-issued headphones but the bland happy-faced logo reminds you of everything you've just rejected. You can't take it back. You can't take it back. Oh god, you _can't take it back._

You need -

Scramble out of bed, root around in your drawer. Your prescription's supposed to make you a better soldier, a better fighter, a better weapon, but if the pills aren't working then you're going to have to fix that, _now._ Shake several gray-and-white capsules into your trembling palm. Swallow them down, will the pounding of your heart to relax into a more tolerable rhythm.

Press your forehead against the wall, cool and slightly sticky, and close your eyes. It's going to take a while for your prescription to really settle in, but the placebo is already steadying your pulse, re-regularizing the pace of your lungs.

Exhale.

It's done. It's already been done and there's nothing you can do about it now.

You've done it. And if they find you...well, maybe they won't find you. Remind yourself that you wiped your data from the administrative offices. According to their records, you were never _part_ of the SCT program. Maybe they won't find you. Maybe they'll just...never find you.

And if they do - whatever the consequences of it, whether they drop you from the program and scrub your brain and force you to forget that you ever cared for anything in your life, it was worth it. It was worth it. It had to have been worth it. _Please let it be worth it._

The quiet numbness that creeps into your skull in the wake of that soul-stripping panic is a welcome shift. Let it work its way into you. Let the chemical swirl of adrenaline and terror gutter, then fade. Organize your mind into a quiet, procedural blankness, and breathe.

Let that nothingness live underneath your skin.

Embrace it.

**\--**

**the hurt returns as it always intended - it is tender  
as the inside of my thighs, it is as blue, too.**

**\--**

Statistically speaking, one in every ten Battery City citizens will experience re-education or memory-bleaching procedures in their lifetimes. An unacknowledged fact, however, is that the numbers there are misleading; the East and South Sectors of the city face significantly higher likelihoods of this than the rest of the population, but the averaging out into a city-wide percentage makes the process sound more common than it is in practice. Most Battery City citizens from upper class districts like Beacon or Meridian will never have to face an appointment with Standard Services. It's an overwhelming likelihood for lower-income households, who see their children pass from schools to juvenile halls to re-education in a steady and seemingly inexorable progression.

In the tall, blocky white towers of Battery City's Standard Services located in the Central Sector, the statistics have just caught up to you.

It's quiet inside the Tube. It's a quiet that doesn't suit how fiercely your heart is pounding or the way you can feel the throb of every vein in your hands and face. Quiet enough that you can hear, in snatches and pieces, the mounting argument taking place outside.

_" - already committed our resources to this!"_

_"And I told you then that it would be a waste. Now this waste can be on your record."_

_"You're putting this on me?"_

_"You personally vouched for him, so yes, Scarecrow, I am putting this on you."_

It's Korse, you guess. Fighting for your continued place in the SCT Program. Again.

Close your eyes. It's not clear to you why he's still bothering. You've made a misstep that can't possibly be taken back, and it sent a clear message to the program where your priorities are. You'll never be passing their final exams. You'll never be progressing into the next stage of SCT development.

Lie down, curl on your side, turn your back on the Tube's door, and close your eyes. Wait for it to be over.

_"This is unprecedented."_

_"Then you can take it up the COC, Scarecrow. This was my call to make, and it is my opinion that this SCT is unsalvageable."_

_"A matter of weeks ago this was your best performance to date."_ Footsteps. _"And this will be reflected on your record. Not mine."_

Scrunch your eyes shut even tighter. Wish you could block out the sound of the argument, the sound of people deciding your fate for you. (Speculate briefly over what it might be like - a version of reality where people ask you, before things happen to you, if you would want to consent to them. Summarily discard the thought as unrealistic.) The panic that had ignited like a tangle of live wires in your guts when you'd been brought in this morning has since died out, faded into infrequent jolts of nausea. You'd scratched at the skin at the backs of your hands until it was all raw and reddened and bled. The lump that still rests in the center of your chest feels like a weight, dragging you downward and pinning you to the floor of the Tube.

It might have been expected of you to struggle, but you hadn't. They'd come for you that morning and the parental service care unit that took the place of your mama had promptly let them in when they asked for you. They'd found you even though you wiped your own records, and that had been less of a shock than it maybe should have been. You'd allowed the exterminators to guide you to the little white building located in Standard Services in the city's Central Sector, marked with the ominous title of _THE TUBE._ You'd let them take you inside, log you for processing, and deposit you into the cylindrical contraption that takes up most of the building's floor space. You'd never actually seen the Tube in person before now, and it's bigger than you thought it'd be. The Tube is one of the best and most efficient means of memory-bleaching that Better Living has. It has the lowest rates of failure. It's reserved for the more extreme cases of when bleaching is required for city denizens.

Inside, it's almost peaceful. The interior is lined with faint scuff marks, places where subjects scratched and clawed ineffectually at their containment. The lines and curves of the Tube's construction are uniform and exact and the pale glare of the interior hurts your eyes (the way most things do if you look at them for long enough). Everything inside is the same crisp, uniform white save for the dark section of paneling at the far end. There's a monitor mounted there for video feeds of the subject, and for the subject.

There's a static hitch as it switches on. 

_"Welcome to the Tube, candidate."_ The voice that addresses you is automated and monotonic and pleasant. Glance over your shoulder. A static image of Mousekat sits suspended against a white backdrop on the screen the voice speaks, fluid and mechanized. _"Take a deep breath and relax. This is an extremely simple and painless procedure, much like sleeping. Once we are done here, you will be as good as new and ready to restart your life."_

Don't acknowledge it. Close your eyes and curl back into your corner.

_"Your presence has been requested here because there is something inside of you that merits correction. It has been deemed inappropriate for your life in Battery City. Please do not be alarmed."_

Wonder if it will hurt.

_"There is something wrong with you, but we are going to fix it. When the procedure is done, you will feel Better than ever."_

The monitor switches off a split second before the Tube starts up with a low, pitched buzz. The humming of sparking currents and engaging circuits vibrates the smooth white paneling beneath you. Wonder idly at the intricacies of how everything inside the thing must fit together. The thought, not the sound, is enough to lift your head to regard the paneling opposite you curiously. Reach forward and make it halfway across the Tube floor before its electromagnetic waves snap to life and bring you to your knees.

It's a spike driven into your skull. It's a fistful of barbed wire nerves being stretched thin to breaking. Feel electricity and the ghost of every bad dream you've ever had spiraling along your synapses, taste ozone and copper and bile slicking the back of your throat. Realize you've ended up on the floor, fists slammed down over your temples while your brain feels like it's being autoclaved in your skull. Scream. Scream until the tissue in your throat _tears_ and the sound ruptures something inside you and you feel yourself begin to sob. You're four years old again, emotionally unregulated and yet to be put on any prescription and feeling everything too brightly and too boldly, unable to articulate pain in any way other than in childish wails and brute, animal sounds of pure undistilled emotion.

Feel your back arch, your muscles clenching under the unendurable tension. Scream your sanity out into your fists and into the floor and when the air in your lungs starts to run out just close your eyes and -

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**\--**

**o windless,  
wingless sky, show me your empire of loneliness,  
let me spring from the jaws of what tried to kill me.**

**\--**

_"Wake up."_

_"You need to wake up."_

_Tonguing the chip in your incisor when you couldn't accurately throw a dual-purpose frag-smoke grenade. Running suicides on the training room floor until your lungs burned. A warm wet tongue up over your face a scarecrow's hand on your shoulder eyes drilling into yours laughter the smell of blood the smell of smoke the sound of your name the sound of your number the sound of screaming the sound of screaming the sound of screaming the_

_"Wake UP, SCT-27."_

**\--**

**let me look at your face  
and see a heaven worth having**

**\--**

Wake up.

There's a hand on your shoulder and another at your back. You're being tugged back to your feet. Sway. End up halfway against the wall. Abruptly buck forward and vomit, spitting chunks of bile in a foul-smelling sluice down over the Tube floor.

"Steady." Your vision's hazy, vacillating between watery and highlighting everything in too-bright definition. The front of your face is sticky with tear tracks. Squint. Realize that it's Korse pulling you upright, Korse keeping you on your feet, Korse's pinched almost-frown appraising you with a brisk efficiency. Realize, also, that you _recognize_ Korse so you already remember far more than what you were expecting.

(How do you map a gap in your memory? How do you discern where those limits lie? What happens when you attempt to delineate a constriction and find that you _can't?_ What do you _do_ once that happens?)

A hand goes to your shoulder, shakes it lightly.

"You're fine," says Korse. "Not washed out just yet."

Peer at him blearily. The words are static electricity on your tongue, unspoken. They clog up in your throat. 

"What's - " That's as far as you make it before the urge to retch gums up the words again.

"They cut you loose now, costs outweigh the gains," Korse tells you, mercifully picking up on your intent in spite of that. "Just had to remind them of it."

Nod. Don't voice the other question that presses up against your trachea. Don't ask _why_ \- why he's bothering with you, why he's sticking his neck out for you, why he's doing _any_ of this for your sake when, as best as you can tell, you're nothing more than an ordinary SCT. Not even high on the leaderboard anymore. Nothing about you demands that anyone pay you any level of attention, much less a high-ranking scarecrow like Korse.

He seems to pick up on your trepidation there as well.

"You're one of the highest-scoring SCTs in the Program's _history,"_ says Korse, the words little more than a barely audible hiss. "They have _no idea_ what you're capable of."

It's hard to tell if the vertigo now threatening to tip you over has more to do with what Korse is saying or the fact that you're fresh from a procedure that should have scraped your head clean but didn't. Nod. Shiver beneath the sheen of cold sweat that clings to your skin.

When you exit the Tube, Weaver is wearing an expression that suggests she's just ingested something incredibly bitter. Her face is pinched and drawn. She narrows her eyes at you.

Do your best to stand at attention, though you can feel yourself trembling. You can barely stand without Korse's support.

"Your continued participation in this Program," says Weaver, icily, "is _conditional,_ and you would do best to remember that. Even if certain _other parties,"_ and here a pointed glare in Korse's direction, "appear to have _forgotten."_

She leaves not long after that, clearly still fuming. Bite the wall of your cheek. Choke down every frantic, unsettled iteration of the same question: _why?_ Why are any of them _bothering_ with you? The first time had been a mistake but this second time, that had been a _choice._ That had been you cleaving yourself from the only thing that's defined you for well over three years and it had been the one singular act you could have taken that allotted you some measure of control and so you'd taken it. You'd _taken_ that out. It was all you had and you'd _taken_ it.

That control was never yours, it turns out. It was as calculated and deceptive as every other stricture that has been, in theory, in your hands.

You're not a good person.

You're not a good person and now that this choice has been made for you, there's no escaping where it will lead you. Where Better Living wants it to go. Perhaps they'd seen your destructive capability from the start, your ability to rend things, and decided early on how they would elect to direct this impulse and harness it for themselves. It's the same instinct your ░░░░er carries inside h░░, only you...you take orders better than ░░e ever has. And they knew it.

Maybe you should stop running from it. That hasn't gotten you anywhere, has it?

It would be nice to get a reason from Korse. Some explanation as to why he's done so much for you of all people. He hasn't, to your knowledge, paid any kind of similar attention to the other SCTs in your class, or to any other SCT at all as far as you can tell. So why you? What makes you so special, so important to him?

Sometimes Korse watches your class as you collectively undergo daily drills and team exercises. You can feel him watching you specifically. What would have once been a reason to push yourself harder and a cause to keep up with and surpass your peers now feels like an anchor hauling you back.

Catch a conversation between Korse and Instructor Weaver while performing cooldowns. Try not to express in any way that you're listening while you stretch, periodically tensing and relaxing sore muscles to keep them limber.

" - not going to be your ticket _up,_ Scarecrow," says Weaver, low and vicious. "I don't know what your play here is, but it won't work."

"No?"

_"No._ Whatever you think this will accomplish - "

"You have no idea what it is I intend." Korse's tone is icy. Again, you can feel him looking at you. Do your best to disregard it.

"You'd do best to stay in your _lane,_ Scarecrow," says Weaver. "You have work to do, and this isn't it."

"My work's above your pay grade." The way Korse says it, you can practically hear the smirk biting through the words. "Don't presume to understand it."

He doesn't approach you again, but he watches you for the rest of the class's duration. Discretely shiver when you exit the SCT building and finally, finally escape the intensity of his stare. 

Try to shrug off the residual way your skin crawls as you ride the last maglev home.

**\--**

**all your sorry angels falling off a piano bench,  
laughing. **

**\--**

You're back in SCT classes full-time. Jackson is gone. You're still there. You're allotted another SCT companion to make up for the one that you no longer have, and this one you do not make the mistake of naming. You have to start from scratch as far as training the thing goes but by now you're so far behind the curve of the other SCTs that it hardly makes a difference anymore. There's some glitch in the system, they say, that rewrote most of your past scores anyway.

Because you wiped your file from their administrative backups. You wiped it from everything you could find. It wasn't enough to save you from when they found you. Why would it? You only had access to SCT files - not city census data, not personal medical records. A stupid, pointless effort on your own stupid, pointless behalf to exercise some kind of control over a life that was never yours to begin with.

Korse is in your corner, though. He's not overseeing your classes any more or less than usual but he watches you during reps sometimes. Grow used to feeling his eyes on you. Every time you can feel his attention and you're still not sure what it is that has him deciding to exert this much care and concern for an SCT like you.

There are holes in your training now, gaps shorn from your memory from your brief stint in the Tube. You blank out during an exam on the history of California in the 1990s _("Not long after the formation of the New American Commonwealth, Battery City was established as its capital for the purposes of - of - ")_ and the failure to recollect what you could once recall easily and without hesitation sinks your daily scores lower. You forget the proper stance during hand-to-hand drills and nearly get concussed because of it. Your knowledge has become patchworked, inconsistent. It feels like the gray matter is sliding out your ears some days. Can't process what Instructor Weaver is telling you about tactical theory but you can recall with perfect clarity the position of every vital organ in the human body. Were you always like this? Was this always your lot?

How much did they take? How much is gone for good? How much will you get back?

_How much will disappear as soon as you learn it?_

What you remember: the taste of a stolen vitamin drink, still warm from the lip of your ░░░░er's mouth. Your ░░░░░er's crooked grin and the way ░e always ran faster than you but never seemed to notice that ░░e was ahead - just that you were with h░░. Your mama's fingers through your hair before you had it cropped regulation-short, and her warm remark that you look good with it long at the top like that. The color of SCT-20's blood and the exact pitch of SCT-11's scream. The way SCT-28 makes her nickname for you a mocking insult through tonal twist alone - the pitch and tenor of her shout of _"Neon"_ and the way she could drag the syllables out until they scraped like nails over concrete. The sound of your ░░░░er trying not to wake you while ░e shook from the force of whatever nightmare had last woken h░░. The sting of a slap and the welling bruise as a mark of failure for inaccurately labeling the working parts of an gas-powered motor vehicle engine.The way amnesia has a taste, fermented and vile; you can recall it with perfect clarity, a phantom tang at the back of your esophagus every time you enter the SCT building.

What you've forgotten: the brand of cheap instant coffee your mama always drank in the mornings. The chemical composition of a military-grade BL/ind-issue explosive. The names of your teachers from before you switched schools. The capitals of the seven states of the New American Commonwealth. How to direct a squad of draculoids to cut off a group in the middle of a firefight. The exact route you used to take to class until it became an early-morning trek to the earliest maglevs to the Central Sector. The feel of painkillers under your tongue during a trip to medical. The smirk in SCT-06's voice on those rare occasions when he called you by your numerical designation and could almost make it sound playful. How to calculate the speed of a moving vehicle. The tone of Jackson's bark and the smell of shed hair mingled with disinfectant. The dim thrill of victory when you hit a long-range target with more than your usual degree of accuracy. 

_How much did they take?_

Accept that you'll never be able to know.

You get lapses sometimes now. You slip out of reality and then when you slip back in, you've missed pieces of what led you to this point. You miss the words people say. You miss gaps of your life, windows where you don't take in new thoughts and you always know when it happens, because the sour taste of bleached memory sticks stale and static to the roof of your mouth.

The Tube, you think, is probably what did this to you. There's no telling if it contributed to breaking your mind in new and interesting ways or if this was an inevitability that it merely accelerated.

You're in perpetual motion and nothing you do is capable of derailing it. You're hurtling toward the moment when you'll be put through final exams and ingested into the S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W/ pipeline properly. You're losing memories, or rather failing to _form_ memories, and no one's noticed. You're taking your prescription. You're doing as you're told. You're keeping your head down. You're trying to atone for your past foundering in the program that has shaped you for years now. You're not like your ░░░░░er, who stays out late and gets in trouble with exterminators and with your parental service care unit and maybe ░░e has the right idea - what more can they possibly take from h░░? You're the only thing ░e has left now and if the SCT Program is determined to have you, that means you won't be in h░░ life for much longer either.

The time is ticking down. It seems no matter the economy of your failures, you're incapable of being purged from the program that had once felt more like a pedestal, and less like a cage.

You're less than three months from final exams.

Resign yourself to this.

Spend late nights sitting up awake in your bed, staring at your ░░░░er who still tosses restlessly in h░░ sleep. Memorize h░░ features. Wonder if ░e's doing the same to you for fear that one day you'll disappear like your mama did. Wonder if ░░e even gets scared of things anymore. It feels like nothing scares h░░; ░e's practically untouchable with how often ░░e incites disciplinary action.

Commit everything of your ░░░░░er to memory. Preserve it behind closed lids: The uneven tilt of h░░ smile, the tint and angle of h░░ eyes, the dark brown of h░░ hair. The way ░e stands when ░░e's upset and the set of h░░ shoulders, how you can always read when the tension there is being stretched to breaking. 

Remember it. Remember it. _Remember it._

Don't let yourself forget this. Not this.

Accept that these few months might be the last time you ever see h░░. Accept that you might go the same way your father did - deployed into the Combat Zones outside the city before being executed by some roving band of killjoys or being ripped apart by med-aug equipment malfunction and ending up a confirmed KIA. Will the program make any effort to notify your ░░░░er whatsoever? Will they deliver files or images or photos to h░░, or will every detail of you be too confidential to be disclosed? Were you, in some bizarre and unintentional way, correct in choosing to erase yourself, as if in preparation to be redacted and expunged after your death?

Will your ░░░░░er even be alive to remember you?

Accept these circumstances. Accept that your death in the next few months to the next few years is overwhelmingly likely and that it is also overwhelmingly likely that it will not be disclosed to your ░░░░░er once it happens. Accept, also, that you think you would prefer this to the alternative - to the possibility that you might outlive h░░ instead, and be left with a new gash across your soul, wider than anything.

Dry-swallow your prescription when the thought churns your insides and threatens to press something sharp and wet to the corners of your eyes.

Resolve to make sure to say goodbye just before it happens - before you go in for exams, and in all likelihood disappear from your ░░░░er's life for good.

Resolve never to keep h░░ wondering if you'll ever come back when you're inevitably the first to die.

**\--**

**do you burn because you remember darkness? outside  
the joy is clamoring. **

**\--**

"Are you awake?"

Blink when your ░░░░░er speaks unexpectedly, because you'd assumed ░e was still asleep. Stupid assumption, maybe. You've got a prescription bottle in hand, because you think you missed your earlier dosage today so you need to take them _now_ before you forget. Because your prescription is supposed to make you...Better. And it has. You've been Better. You've been improving in your classes, you think, even if you'll never be as good as you were. Your BLi headphones are still hooked around your neck while you stand in front of your dresser waiting for the pills to kick in.

You must have had another lapse. You hadn't realized it.

"Yeah," you whisper back.

Your ░░░░░er climbs out of bed, steps forward. H░░ footfalls are quiet against the carpet. If ░░e switches on the room's overhead lights your parental care unit will know you're both awake so you don't know how much of your face ░e can see...but you can see h░░ just fine. You can't read the expression there. It's drawn, pinched, nervous. It's not like h░░.

"Yeah," you breathe again. Yeah, you're awake.

Your ░░░░er takes another step forward and something _cracks_ underneath. Look down and realize that the floor of your room is scattered with tiny capsules, with shattered pieces of plastic from a broken prescription bottle. Look back to your ░░░░░er, your mouth dry.

"We..." Your ░░░░er struggles briefly to form the words. Then h░░ hand falls against your shoulder, the fingers drawing tight around your bicep. "We have to go."

Stare at h░░.

"We have to _go,"_ ░░e repeats urgently, h░░ grip tightening. "Before she - "

░e doesn't finish the sentence, but ░░e doesn't have to. Before the automaton that's been made to replace your mama notices the unnatural sounds coming from the room and heads in to investigate. Your ░░░░░er stares at you frantically, eyes searching yours for something you don't think ░e manages to find because h░░ jaw tightens and then, without any warning whatsoever, ░░e grabs your wrist and pries your prescription out from your fingertips.

(You could break h░░ grip with a knee-strike to the diaphragm and then you could grab h░░ head and put it in a guillotine and you'd do it so easily, so quickly that you don't think your ░░░░er would have a chance to retaliate.) (You could, but your breath is frozen in your lungs as it happens and you hadn't - hadn't _expected_ it, hadn't seen it coming. No from h░░.)

Your pills hit the ground in a soundless scatter of white and gray tablets, muffled against the carpet.

"Come on," ░e whispers. ░░e tugs on your hand and h░░ grip is so tight that you can feel the frantic, jackrabbit pulse pumping through h░░ blood. _"Come on."_

Your mama is gone. Jackson is gone. Your father was never there to begin with. 

Your ░░░░░er is the only person you have left.

So what choice do you have but to take h░░ hand, hold to it tightly, and let h░░ lead? Out the open window, scaling down the wall in worn boots and stained shirts. You hit the ground after your ░░░░er, feet to tarmac. Take in the pavement with the weeds spilling out from warped and buckled asphalt, the uneven front step, the building that's been losing its finish of white paint for years now. Take it in because there's a finality in your ░░░░er's steps and with the kind of purposefulness ░e's always exhibited, you've accepted that whatever this impulse is, it will take you past the standard deviations your life has been enclosed by thus far. 

Wonder, briefly, if you'll ever see this place again.

Then your ░░░░░er yanks on your hand and starts moving.

Follow.

Follow because it's easiest. Follow because it's a relief to, for once, _not_ have to be a leader or a paragon or a failure or a bad example. Follow because nothing is being expected of you but obedience, and you can at least manage that. Follow because that relief is a release of tension clenched in your shoulders, like the easing of a headache you hadn't realized you had.

Follow because it means that _goodbye_ doesn't have to come just yet, and that in and of itself is worth anything.

"Stay down." Your ░░░░er talks fast, talks low, eyes boring into yours. "We gotta move quick. Okay?"

Nod. Let h░░ take the lead, combing into the East Sector, sidestepping draculoid contingents moving through the quiet, after-curfew city dark. You hadn't realized your ░░░░░er knew how to navigate this part of the city. There's...a lot about your ░░░░er that you realize you maybe should have known. When was the last time you spoke to h░░, really? When was the last time the pair of you had a conversation about anything in particular, or an exchange that was more than a few solemn greetings or "good night"s?

What kind of moments have you had that you've since forgotten?

"Move!" Your ░░░░░er shouts it and you're doing so before you can register why. You're moving on reflex, obeying the order with unconscious intent.

Making for the city line.

You've only seen it in your studies and textbooks, in grainy images on a thumbdrive in the sole of your shoe. You can tell it's what you're moving toward because the line of the setting sun has ignited a streak of orange and purple bleeding up along the ridge of the sands of Combat Zone One. It's barely visible through the silhouettes of the buildings. It's the furthest edge of the East Sector of Battery City, where the planned expansion efforts have yet to be finished. Buildings and partitions sit in perpetual partial stages of completion. Complements of draculoids mingle with exterminators who cycle in semi-regular patrols around the area to ensure citizens don't breach the city line. Like you're about to right now.

Don't question why you're heading for it. Don't question where your ░░░░░░er got the idea and why ░░e's doing this with you now, or why ░e didn't think to simply leave you behind. Don't wonder, don't think, don't imagine. Don't do anything at all but _move,_ legs and arms pumping like pistons, tearing after your ░░░░░er who moves fast and unerring for the point in space where Battery City becomes the desert. There's no time for anything else.

_"Hey!"_ It's a sharp, gravely bark. The white blot of an exterminator's uniform glows ghostly at the corners of your heightened vision. You might be able to pick out that your opposition is one singular exterminator but the same can't be said of your ░░░░░er, who doesn't have your eyes. To this exterminator in the semidarkness, the pair of you must be indistinguishable from any other pair of Ritalin Rats who might be keen on trying their luck beyond the city walls. No way of telling that you're an SCT on the run for no other reason besides the fact that your ░░░░er had grabbed your hand and told you to come with h░░, and you'd listened.

The exterminator shoots. Their aim is askew; no chance that they'll be hitting either of you from such a distance. They're certainly no scarecrow. Your ░░░░░er ducks anyway in a motion that seems automatic. H░░ breath emerges in tight, athletic bursts as ░░e runs.

You keep pace. It's easy. It's every drill you've ever run, every time you've done extra laps, every time you passed SCT-06 during reps. Run until the pavement gives way to soft, slippery sand that trips you up and causes you to skid. Behind you there are shouts, the odd chirp of laser fire, but the blasts fly hopelessly off the mark and the pair of you are too far out.

Your ░░░░░er starts flagging first. H░░ breathing turns labored, h░░ pace slows, and ░░e stumbles from a run to a jog and then to an exhausted trudge. Keep pace. Slow when ░e does, don't pull too far ahead, even though you think that you could keep running. Your momentum could keep you plunging forward until fatigue and withdrawal catches up to you, but you slow when your ░░░░er does. ░░e tethers you back.

You're all either of you have left now.

The night shades the desert in a deep, sweeping canvas of blues and purples. The cold knifes against your bare skin in an unforgiving stream while the wind stirs the sand beneath you. Your breath crisps in your lungs with each breath; every exhale is a misted cloud that hangs in the air for a fraction of a second before it dissipates.

Stars glint weakly from behind the thick patina of smoke that blots out almost everything. The shadow they cast must make it difficult to see, but that's not a problem for you. Your ░░░░░er isn't so fortunate. ░e slides on the sand frequently, misjudges distance. You catch h░░ by the arm or by the shoulder every time it happens until eventually the pair of you are more or less leaned up against each other as you walk.

"We made it." Your ░░░░er's eyes glitter in the half-dark, reflecting the faded starlight. You can see, very clearly, the exact way h░░ mouth splits open into a wide, wide grin, wider than anything you'd ever seen on h░░ face in the city, as ░e issues a loud, uncontrollable bark of laughter.

░░e stops walking, doubles over with h░░ hands braced over h░░ knees as ░e laughs, then wheezes, then starts coughing as the exertion of the out-and-out sprint from the city line starts to catch up with h░░. It's a sensation with which you're intimately familiar from pushing yourself too hard during cooldown laps and daily reps. Steady h░░ with a hand to the shoulder. Startle when h░░ hand snaps up and closes around your wrist.

Your ░░░░░er yanks you forward, pulls you tight against h░░, hugging you so fierce that it stops your breath for a second.

"We made it," ░░e whispers again. The words sound nearly broken in two. "We _made_ it."

Hug h░░ back. You...can't remember the last time you had the occasion to.

The chill of the desert ghosts over your skin and you shiver, though that might have more to do with the fact that you missed your last prescription's dosage and now you're paying the price for it. You haven't missed dosages often. You can't remember the last time you _did._ Ever the dutiful son, ever the dutiful SCT, ever the model student, and now what are you?

_Kid nobody. Kid nothing._

The effects of withdrawal kick in quickly. It's what happens when you've been on a continuous chemical cocktail for most of your life. 

What do you know of the common withdrawal symptoms?

(Not much. This was never covered, of course. The expectation was that you'd be taking those pills forever. Because you were graded, ranked, parsed, and praised for your ability to follow orders.)

Keep walking. Your ░░░░er props h░░self up against you and vice versa as the pair of you move in tandem. You're trying to keep yourself moving in the freezing desert of the Combat Zones at night and the wind is a harsh slap against the sheen of icy sweat wicking down your skin. When you and your ░░░░░er stop to catch your breath, your hands shake. Focus on the way that the muscles tremor so rapidly that no amount of willing them still will force them to obey. It could be the cold...but you think more likely it's the meds, or both.

In the city you could run miles on the indoor SCT tracks, but you'd been well-rested, on your prescription, and in the temp-regulating haven of Battery City with its perfect weather control. As you tip over onto the dirt and retch, spit a sickening dribble of half-digested protein and stomach acid, come to the violent understanding that while the SCT Program may have been dedicated to preparing you for a life roving the Combat Zones, it in actuality did nothing of the sort. They taught you history and tactics and mathematics and biology and how to treat an open wound and how to break someone's arm and what it would mean to function in the desert outside Battery City in theory but none of it actually prepared you for the experience of setting foot into the Combat Zones themselves.

They taught you of war and of killing and of so many other things but they taught you on a purely theoretical level and now you're about to learn just how extensive that education was, and how much they expected you to learn the hard way.

There's no going back now. Every door that was once opened to you by default has been slammed shut. Your ░░░░░er took your hand and ran and you followed h░░ and now there's no walking back from that. ░░e'd made the choice to run and to take you with h░░, but weren't you the one who made the choice to follow? _Was_ that a choice, in the moment?

Don't talk. Keep it to a minimum. Dredge up every lesson you can remember on surviving in the desert on low resources. 

Start easy. Start with a tally. What do you have to your name? Your clothes - shirt, shoes, socks, boots, along with your requisite underthings. A thumbdrive secreted in the heel of your boot.

What does your ░░░░er have? The same, presumably, though you doubt ░e has a thumbdrive anywhere on h░░ person. The clothes on your backs aren't much in the way of protection against the weather. And the weather, in the Combat Zones, is...extreme. The extreme cold in the nights and the extreme heat in the day will _require_ the cover of additional layers if you intend to last very long, and at present neither of you have so much as a jacket between you. Something like that was never necessary in the sanctuary of Battery City's weather control.

The best defense you have against the biting cold is to keep moving, to keep the blood flowing and your muscles from seizing up, and you do. You support your ░░░░░er and ░░e you. The pair of you keep each other upright. Don't talk. Keep conversation to a minimum. Save your saliva. Feel yourself losing moisture every time you pitch forward and have to vomit because your insides feel like they're boiling. The city's unmistakable silhouette at your back keeps you moving. The minute adrenaline spike that spiders out behind your chest every time you look over your shoulder and glimpse it keeps you moving. The thought of exterminators in pursuit and what might happen if they were to catch you, understand what you are and what you could have _been,_ keeps you moving. The threat of consequence keeps you moving.

Learn what the limit of human exhaustion actually feels like, instead of what Instructor Weaver told you it would be. Learn what it is to reach a point where every muscle literally shakes with exhaustion. Learn how it feels to keep yourself moving when every step feels like it's about to send you sprawling to the ground. Understand and remember that this is Newton's first law at work: objects in motion will stay in motion. If you trip and end up in the dust you know that nothing will get you moving again because objects at rest will stay at rest.

Feel the weight of withdrawal and fatigue and cold.

Feel _human._ Wallow in it.

Open your eyes.

You're curled on your side in the sand, shivering so violently that your teeth rattle in the bone basin of your skull. Beside you, your ░░░░░er is doing...something. Moving stiffly. Crane your neck and study the thick shape that lies like a heavy, pale slug in the dust beside you. You know that logo, that BL/ind happy face. The glaring white has been tinted a deep blue but the shape of the thing is unmistakable.

Your ░░░░er chokes wetly, spitting bile as ░e struggles to open it. Because - 

Because _a BL/ind-issue bodybag is forty-seven percent carbon and thirty-nine percent plastic and fourteen percent undisclosed materials and once temperature controls are activated they are heated to a base temperature of ninety-eight-point-six degrees_ , to ensure that the subject inside them will continue to decompose in spite of the freezing desert nights.

The warmth radiating from the carbon-plastic sheath is unmistakable. The heated stink of the moldering corpse inside gusts toward you in a warm, wet breath when the frigid wind kicks up again.

It reeks, but it's warm.

Doubtless your ░░░░░er has the same thought. ░░e's struggling to get the thing open, fumbling at the zipper with fingers that look bluish and numb. ░e struggles with the corpse, to turn it over. The sound ░░e makes when ░e can't fully lift it sounds almost akin to a sob.

It's cold and you can't stop shaking but your ░░░░er is trying to save both of your lives by excavating this nameless carcass from a bodybag and ░░e's crying because ░e can't quite manage it. You can see the glint of tears of h░░ cheeks, because the lightless night isn't a problem for you.

Getting up feels like an impossible task. The cold has set into your bones, digging into your stiff muscles.

But your ░░░░░er is crying.

So you get up. You get _up_ and even though it aches, you bite your tongue and when the warm flood of copper rinses your mouth you feel like you might start crying too. It's warmth. You're not frozen solid yet. _You're not nobody yet._

Work your hands underneath the corpse's head. The hair feels stringy, the skin feels papery, and you can see altogether too clearly the patchwork decay that has already set in. It's the first dead body you've ever handled and your training never prepared you for this either. Your stomach is wrung dry but you gag anyway, choke back the urge to spit up whatever acidic soup still lingers in your stomach.

The pair of you lever the body from its bag and roll it out onto the sands. The skin of its back and neck and shoulders is almost black from how the blood has pooled there. The rigor mortis has stiffened everything about it save for the places where its skin ripples from the scavenging insects moving beneath.

Turn away. Your ░░░░er is half-huddled on the ground, staring at h░░ hands in front of h░░, eyes wide. Now that you've done what you have to in order to ensure you can make it through the night, ░e's frozen up.

Settle your hand on h░░ shoulder.

"Come on." Taste drying vomit and blood on your lips. Feel the violent tremor of your ░░░░░er's shoulder beneath your fingers, and the way your hand shudders with the same inescapable convulsions.

The bag is big enough to accommodate both of you. All BL/ind bodybags are made to house fully grown adults, and the pair of you are barely teenagers. Climb inside, and take your ░░░░er's hand. Tug h░░ in after.

The temperature regulation means that it's already warm. It still reeks, but it's life, and it's the only way you're going to make it through your first night in the desert. Hug your ░░░░░er close and feel h░░ doing the same to you, huddling to keep warm.

Drag the zipper of the bodybag up until it's almost latched shut. Almost. A sliver of cold air tickles your forehead, so that the pair of you don't suffocate overnight.

You sleep in restive bursts. The painful thawing of every limb wakes you periodically, and when it isn't that it's your ░░░░er fighting down groans of h░░ own while h░░ body starts to regain its natural heat. The pair of you are no longer freezing but you're still weathering the violent tremors and the jolts of nausea and the pounding headaches that come from having been cut off from your prescriptions.

Tell yourself that you made a choice, even though you didn't, really. Your ░░░░░er made the choice for you - ripped the bottle from your hand and grabbed you and ran. Your ░░░░er made a choice that you yourself had never considered making, because why would you? What choice would there have been? You'd attempted that choice once before already, and it had gotten you nothing but an attempted memory-bleaching in the Tube. The SCT Program was determined to keep you, and you'd accepted this.

You might have been able to fight it, you think, and made a choice of the two roads that were presented to you: your prescription or your ░░░░░er. Familiarity and stability or the one person you still have that's worth fighting for. But you'd decided nothing in the moment. You'd simply allowed your ░░░░er to drag you from the city and remove that decision from your hands.

Study the texture of your thoughts from this.

Decide that you can't resent that. Not truly. Because you'd made that choice one night anyway, hadn't you, you'd made that choice when you'd wondered what it might feel like to be responsible for the death of something you loved and found that you couldn't go through with it.

You'd made your choice. You just needed your ░░░░░er to act on it for you.

Hug h░░ closer, and close your eyes.

It's going to be a long night, and tomorrow it will be an even longer day.

But right now you just need to make it through the night.

**\--**

**it is almost like the worst day of your life  
is ordinary for everyone else.**

**\--**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, shout-outs.
> 
> 1\. The doctors in this chapter, Stewart and Rivera, are shout-outs to two of the creative minds behind the world of _Danger Days._ "Stewart" is a reference to the colorist for a promotional piece for _The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys_ comic mini-series, while "Rivera" is a reference to John Rivera - writer, director, and creative consultant for the music videos. The KIA date listed in the thumbdrive, 13-JUN-2001, is a shout-out to the release date for the _Danger Days_ album's fifth single, "Bulletproof Heart," which was released on June 13, 2011. The city ordinance referenced in Kobra's files, S.32-5011C, is a reference to the release date for the album's fourth single, "Planetary (Go!)," which was released on March 25, 2011. The bit character with the designation of SCT-20 is a reference to the _Danger Days_ album's sixth and final single, "The Kids from Yesterday," which was released on January 20, 2012.
> 
> 2\. This chapter's title (and the chapter's content itself) contains a reference to a lyric from Gym Class Heroes' "Kid Nothing and the Never-Ending Naked Nightmare," off of their 2011 album, _The Papercut Chronicles II_. In general I listened to a lot of GCH while crafting Kobra Kid's backstory and internal monologue - _The Papercut Chronicles_ is one of those albums that feels intrinsically tied to him for me.
> 
> 3\. The poems between the line breaks are Chen Chen's "How I Became Sagacious" and Ruth Awad's "In the gloaming, in the roiling night" respectively. Neither are my own composition.

**Author's Note:**

> As a disclaimer right from the get-go - I'm not altogether happy with this one. I've messed around with structuring and pacing and I can't get it all to fit together in a way that's satisfying to me. All the pieces are functionally there, in theory, but it feels like something critical is missing and I can't say what. That being said, after a while I was just sitting on this without doing anything with it, and I realized that since it's been a while since I've posted properly, I might as well just go ahead and post it as is. I'm not generally the type to go back and edit my work after the fact unless it's to adjust grammar and fix up pacing or continuity issues, but if I ever figure out what's up with this piece and why it doesn't sit quite right with me, I'll probably go through it and tighten it up some editing-wise.
> 
> Other notes!
>
>> 1\. Just about every name and number involved in this chapter is a reference. Instructor Weaver is a tribute to the director of photography involved in the music video for "Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)." The designation of SCT-06 comes from the comic mini-series for _The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys_ , as it had six issues. SCT-28 is a tribute to September 28th, 2010, the release date for "Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)," the first single off the album. SCT-11 is likewise a tribute to October 11th, 2010, the release date for "The Only Hope for Me Is You," the album's second single. SCT-03 is a tribute to the third single release date, namely "Sing," which had a release date of November 3rd, 2010. The name of the dog, "Jackson," is a shoutout to one of the colorists for _The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys_ comic mini-series.
>> 
>> 2\. The poem between the line breaks is "ON BEING RAISED ON FAIRY TALES IN WHICH YOU ARE THE MONSTER," by Marlow Avery Higgins. It is not my own composition. This work's chapter title is a paraphrased quote from an old journal entry written by Pete Wentz (naturally).
>> 
>> 3\. I'd like to make a special shout-out to Soph over at [neon-rat](neon-rat.tumblr.com), for allowing me to use her URL as an in-universe insult. It came up naturally while drafting this chapter, and I asked her if it would be all right that I used it in that context. They graciously agreed to, and were very kind to do so.


End file.
